The superstition of divorce

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

THE SUPERSTITION
OF DIVORCE

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

LONDON
CHATTO &f WINDUS

1920

91 32;<:o

WM.I.IAM CU)WB9 *NB »0N», l.tMITKa,
U3ND0N AND nl'O I.B.!..

A /J riifhl) rtiirvril

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The earlier part of this book came out in the
form of five articles which appeared in the
" New Witness " at the crisis of the recent
controversy in the Press on the subject of
divorce. Crude and sketchy as they con-
fessedly were, they had a certain rude plan
of their own, which I find it very difficult to
recast even in order to expand. I have there-
fore decided to reprint the original articles as
they stood, save for a few introductory words ;
and then, at the risk of repetition, to add a few
further chapters, explaining more fully any
conceptions that may seem to have been too
crudely assumed or dismissed. I have set
forth the original matter as it appeared, under
a general heading, without dividing it into
chapters.

G K. C.

CONTENTS

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE 3

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY 57

THE STORY OF THE VOW 8l

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE 105

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE I29

CONCLUSION 149

THE SUPERSTITION OF
DIVORCE

THE SUPERSTITION OF
DIVORCE

I

It is futile to talk of reform without reference
to form. To take a case from my own taste
and fancy, there is nothing I feel to be so
beautiful and wonderful as a window. All
casements are magic casements, whether they
open on the foam or the front-garden ; they
lie close to the ultimate mystery and paradox
of limitation and liberty. But if I followed my
instinct towards an infinite number of windows,
it would end in having no walls. It would
also (it may be added incidentally) end in
having no windows either ; for a window makes
a picture by making a picture-frame. But
there is a simpler way of stating my more
simple and fatal error. It is that I have

3

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

wanted a window,, without considering whether
I wanted a house. Now many appeals are
being made to us to-day on behalf of that
light and liberty that might well be symbolised
by windows ; especially as so many of them
concern the enlightenment and liberation of
the house, in the sense of the home. Many
quite disinterested people urge many quite
reasonable considerations in the case of divorce,
as a type of domestic liberation ; but in the
journalistic and general discussion of the matter
there is far too much of the mind that works
backwards and at random, in the manner of all
windows and no walls. Such people say
they want divorce, without asking themselves
whether they want marriage. Even in order
to be divorced it has generally been found
necessary to go through the preliminary for-
mality of being married ; and unless the nature
of this initial act be considered, we might as
well be discussing haircutting for the bald or
spectacles for the blind. To be divorced is to
be in the literal sense unmarried ; and there is

4

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

no sense in a thing being undone when we do
not know if it is done.

There is perhaps no worse advice, nine
times out of ten, than the advice to do the
work that's nearest. It is especially bad when
it means, as it generally does, removing the
obstacle that's nearest. It means that men are
not to behave like men but like mice ; who
nibble at the thing that's nearest. The man,
like the mouse, undermines what he cannot
understand. Because he himself bumps into
a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle ; though
the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that
holds up the whole roof over his head. He
industriously removes the obstacle ; and in
return the obstacle removes him, and much
more valuable things than he. This oppor-
tunism is perhaps the most unpractical thing
in this highly unpractical world. People talk
vaguely against destructive criticism ; but
what is the matter with this criticism is not
that it destroys, but that it does not criticise.
It is destruction without design. It is taking

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

a complex machine to pieces bit by bit, in any
order, without even knowing what the machine
is for. And if a man deals with a deadly
dynamic machine on the principle of touching
the knob that's nearest, he will find out the
defects of that cheery philosophy. Now leaving
many sincere and serious critics of modern
marriage on one side for the moment, great
masses of modern men and women, who write
and talk about marriage, are thus nibbling
blindly at it like an army of mice. When the
reformers propose, for instance, that divorce
should be obtainable after an absence of three
years (the absence actually taken for granted
in the first military arrangements of the late
European War) their readers and supporters
could seldom give any sort of logical reason
for the period being three years, and not three
months or three minutes. They are like people
who should say " Give me three feet of dog " ;
and not care where the cut came. Such
persons fail to see a dog as an organic entity ;
in other words, they cannot make head or tail

6

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

of it. And the chief thing to say about such
reformers of marriage is that they cannot make
head or tail of it. They do not know what it
is, or what it is meant to be, or what its sup-
porters suppose it to be ; they never look at it,
even when they are inside it. They do the
work that's nearest ; which is poking holes in
the bottom of a boat under the impression that
they are digging in a garden. This question
of what a thing is, and whether it is a garden
or a boat, appears to them abstract and academic.
They have no notion of how large is the idea
they attack ; or how relatively small appear
the holes that they pick in it.

Thus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an in-
telligent man in other matters, says that there
is only a " theological " opposition to divorce,
and that it is entirely founded on " certain
texts" in the Bible about marriage. This is
exactly as if he said that a belief in the
brotherhood of men was only founded on
certain texts in the Bible, about all men being
the children of Adam and Eve. Millions of

7

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

peasants and plain people all over the world
assume marriage to be static, without having
ever clapped eyes on any text. Numbers of
more modern people, especially after the recent
experiments in America, think divorce is a
social disease, without having ever bothered
about any text. It may be maintained that
even in these, or in any one, the idea of marriage
is ultimately mystical ; and the same may be
maintained about the idea of brotherhood.
It is obvious that a husband and wife are not
visibly one flesh, in the sense of being one
quadruped. It is equally obvious that Pade-
rewski and Jack Johnson are not twins,
and probably have not played together at
their mother's knee. There is indeed a very
important admission, or addition, to be realised
here. What is true is this : that if the non-
sense of Nietzsche or some such sophist sub-
merged current culture, so that it was the
fashion to deny the duties of fraternity ; then
indeed it might be found that the group which
still affirmed fraternity was the original group

8

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

in whose sacred books was the text about
Adam and Eve. Suppose some Prussian
professor has opportunely discovered that Ger-
mans and lesser men are respectively descended
from two such very dififerent monkeys that
they are in no sense brothers, but barely
cousins (German) any number of times re-
moved. And suppose he proceeds to remove
them even further with a hatchet ; suppose he
bases on this a repetition of the conduct of
Cain, saying not so much " Am I my brother's
keeper ? " as " Is he really my brother ? "
And suppose this higher philosophy of the
hatchet becomes prevalent in colleges and
cultivated circles, as even more foolish philo-
sophies have done. Then I agree it probably
will be the Christian, the man who preserves
the text about Cain, who will continue to
assert that he is still the professor's brother ;
that he is still the professor's keeper. He
may possibly add that, in his opinion, the pro-
fessor seems to require a keeper.

And that is doubtless the situation in the
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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

controversies about divorce and marriage to-
day. It is the Christian church which con-
tinues to hold strongly, when the world for
some reason has weakened on it, what many
others hold at other times. But even then it
is barely picking up the shreds and scraps of
the subject to talk about a reliance on texts.
The vital point in the comparison is this : that
human brotherhood means a whole view of life,
held in the light of life, and defended, rightly
or wrongly, by constant appeals to every aspect
of life. The religion that holds it most strongly
will hold it when nobody else holds it ; that is
quite true, and that some of us may be so
perverse as to think a point in favour of the
religion. But anybody who holds it at all will
hold it as a philosophy, not hung on one text
but on a hundred truths. Fraternity may be
a sentimental metaphor; I may be suffering
a delusion when I hail a Montenegrin peasant
as my long-lost brother. As a fact, I have
my own suspicions about which of us it is
that has got lost. But my delusion is not a

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

deduction from one text, or from twenty ; it is
the expression of a relation that to me at
least seems a reality. And what I should
say about the idea of a brother, I should say
about the idea of a wife.

It is supposed to be very unbusinesslike to
begin at the beginning. It is called " abstract
and academic principles with which we English,
etc., etc." It is still in some strange way
considered unpractical to open up inquiries
about anything by asking what it is. I happen
to have, however, a fairly complete contempt
for that sort of practicality ; for I know that it
is not even practical. My ideal business man
would not be one who planked down fifty
pounds and said " Here is hard cash ; I am a
plain man ; it is quite indifferent to me whether
I am paying a debt, or giving alms to a beggar,
or buying a wild bull or a bathing machine."
Despite the infectious heartiness of his tone, I
should still, in considering the hard cash, say
(like a cabman) " What's this ? " I should
continue to insist, priggishly, that it was a

II

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

highly practical point what the money was ;
what it was supposed to stand for, to aim at or
to declare ; what was the nature of the trans-
action; or, in short, what the devil the man
supposed he was doing, I shall therefore
begin by asking, in an equally mystical manner,
what in the name of God and the angels a man
getting married supposes he is doing. I shall
begin by asking what marriage is ; and the
mere question will probably reveal that the
act itself, good or bad, wise or foolish, is of a
certain kind ; that it is not an inquiry or an
experiment or an accident : it may probably
dawn on us that it is a promise. It can be
more fully defined by saying it is a vow.

Many will immediately answer that it is a
rash vow. I am content for the moment to
reply that all vows are rash vows. I am not
now defending but defining vows ; I am point-
ing out that this is a discussion about vows ;
first, of whether there ought to be vows ; and
second, of what vows ought to be. Ought
a man to break a promise } Ought a man to

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

make a promise ? These are philosophic ques-
tions ; but the philosophic peculiarity of divorce
and re-marriage, as compared with free love
and no marriage, is that a man breaks and
makes a promise at the same moment. It is
a highly German philosophy; and recalls the
way in which the enemy wishes to celebrate
his successful destruction of all treaties by
signing some more. If I were breaking a
promise, I would do it without promises. But
I am very far from minimising the momentous
and disputable nature of the vow itself. I
shall try to show, in a further article, that this
rash and romantic operation is the only furnace
from which can come the plain hardware of
humanity, the cast-iron resistance of citizenship
or the cold steel of common sense ; but I
am not denying that the furnace is a fire.
The vow is a violent and unique thing ;
though there have been many besides the
marriage vow ; vows of chivalry, vows of
poverty, vows of celibacy, pagan as well as
Christian. But modern fashion has rather

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

fallen out of the habit ; and men miss the type
for the lack of the parallels. The shortest
way of putting the problem is to ask whether
being free includes being free to bind oneself.
For the vow is a tryst with oneself.

I may be misunderstood if I say, for brevity,
that marriage is an affair of honour. The
sceptic will be delighted to assent, by saying
it is a fight. And so it is, if only with oneself ;
but the point here is that it necessarily has the
touch of the heroic, in which virtue can be
translated by virtus. Now about fighting, in
its nature, there is an implied infinity, or at
least a potential infinity. I mean that loyalty
in war is loyalty in defeat or even disgrace ; it is
due to the flag precisely at the moment when
the flag nearly falls. We do already apply
this to the flag of the nation ; and the question
is whether it is wise or unwise to apply it to
the flag of the family. Of course, it is tenable
that we should apply it to neither; that mis-
government in the nation or misery in the
citizen would make the desertion of the flag an

14

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

act of reason and not treason, I will only
say here that, if this were really the limit of
national loyalty, some of us would have deserted
our nation long ago.

15

II

To the two or three articles appearing here on
this subject I have given the title of the Super-
stition of Divorce ; and the title is not taken
at random. While free love seems to me a
heresy, divorce does really seem to me a
superstition. It is not only more of a super-
stition than free love, but much more of a
superstition than strict sacramental marriage ;
and this point can hardly be made too plain. It
is the partisans of divorce, not the defenders
of marriage, who attach a stiff and senseless
sanctity to a mere ceremony, apart from the
meaning of the ceremony. It is our opponents,
and not we, who hope to be saved by the letter
of ritual, instead of the spirit of reality. It is
they who hold that vow or violation, loyalty or
disloyalty, can all be disposed of by a mysterious
and magic rite, performed first in a law court

i6

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

and then in a church or a registry office.
There is little difference between the two parts
of the ritual ; except that the law court is much
more ritualistic. But the plainest parallels will
show anybody that all this is sheer barbarous
credulity. It may or may not be superstition
for a man to believe he must kiss the Bible to
show he is telling the truth. It is certainly
the most grovelling superstition for him to
believe that, if he kisses the Bible, anything
he says will come true. It would surely be
the blackest and most benighted Bible-worship
to suggest that the mere kiss on the mere
book alters the moral quality of perjury. Yet
this is pi;'ecisely what is implied in saying that
formal re-marriage alters the moral quality of
conjugal infidelity. It may have been a mark
of the Dark Ages that Harold should swear
on a relic, though he were afterwards forsworn.
But surely those ages would have been at their
darkest, if he had been content to be sworn on
a relic and forsworn on another relic. Yet
this is the new altar these reformers would

17 c

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

erect for us, out of the mouldy and meaning-
less relics of their dead law and their dying
religion.

Now we, at any rate, are talking about an
idea, a thing of the intellect and the soul ;
which we feel to be unalterable by legal antics.
We are talking about the idea of loyalty ;
perhaps a fantastic, perhaps only an unfashion-
able idea, but one we can explain and defend
as an idea. Now I have already pointed out
that most sane men do admit our ideal in such
a case as patriotism or public spirit; the
necessity of saving the state to which we
belong. The patriot may revile but must not
renounce his country ; he must curse it to cure
it, but not to wither it up. The old pagan
citizens felt thus about the city ; and modern
nationalists feel thus about the nation. But
even mere modern internationalists feel it about
something ; if it is only the nation of mankind.
Even the humanitarian does not become a
misanthrope and live in a monkey-house.
Even a disappointed Collectivist or Communist

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

does not retire into the exclusive society of
beavers, because beavers are all communists of
the most class-conscious solidarity. He admits
the necessity of clinging to his fellow-creatures,
and begging them to abandon the use of the
possessive pronoun ; heart-breaking as his
efforts must seem to him after a time. Even
a Pacifist does not prefer rats to men, on the
ground that the rat community is so pure from
the taint of Jingoism as always to leave the
sinking ship. In short, everybody recognises
that there is some ship, large and small, which
he ought not to leave, even when he thinks it
is sinking.

We may take it then that there are
institutions to which we are attached finally ;
just as there are others to which we are
attached temporarily. We go from shop to
shop trying to get what we want ; but we do
not go from nation to nation doing this ; unless
we belong to a certain group now heading
very straight for Pogroms. In the first case
it is the threat that we shall withdraw our

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

custom ; in the second it is the threat that we
shall never withdraw ourselves ; that we shall
be part of the institution to the last. The time
when the shop loses its customers is the time
when the city needs its citizens ; but it
needs them as critics who will always remain
to criticise. I need not now emphasise the
deadly need of this double energy of internal
reform and external defence ; the whole
towering tragedy which has eclipsed our earth
in our time is but one terrific illustration of it.
The hammer-strokes are coming thick and
fast now,* and filling the world with infernal
thunders ; and there is still the iron sound
of something unbreakable deeper and louder
than all the things that break. We may curse
the kings, we may distrust the captains, we may
murmur at the very existence of the armies ;
but we know that in the darkest days that may
come to us, no man will desert the flag.

Now when we pass from loyalty to the

* Written at the time of the last great German assault.
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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

nation to loyalty to the family, there can be
no doubt about the first and plainest difference.
The difference is that the family is a thing far
more free. The vow is a voluntary loyalty ;
and the marriage vow is marked among
ordinary oaths of allegiance by the fact that
the allegiance is also a choice. The man is
not only a citizen of the city, but also the
founder and builder of the city. He is not
only a soldier serving the colours, but he has
himself artistically selected and combined the
colours, like the colours of an individual dress.
If it be admissible to ask him to be true to the
commonwealth that has made him, it is at
least not more illiberal to ask him to be true
to the commonwealth he has himself made.
If civic fidelity be, as it is, a necessity, it is
also in a special sense a constraint. The old
joke against patriotism, the Gilbertian irony,
congratulated the Englishman on his fine and
fastidious taste in being born in England. It
made a plausible point in saying " For he
might haye been a Russian"; though indeed

21

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

we have lived to see some persons who seemed
to think they could ber Russians when the
fancy took them. If common sense considers
even such involuntary loyalty natural, we can
hardly wonder if it thinks voluntary loyklty
still more natural. And the small state
founded on the sexes is at once the most
voluntary and the most natural of all self-
governing states. It is not true of Mr. Brown
that he might have been a Russian ; but it
may be true of Mrs. Brown that she might
have been a Robinson.

Now it is not at all hard to see why this
small community, so specially free touching its
cause, should yet be specially bound touching
its effects. It is not hard to see why the vow
made most freely is the vow kept most firmly.
There are attached to it, by the nature of
things, consequences so tremendous that no
contract can offer any comparison. There is
no contract, unless it be that said to be signed
in blood, that can call spirits from the vasty
deep ; or bring cherubs (or goblins) to inhabit

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

a small modern villa. There is no stroke of
the pen which creates real bodies and souls,
or makes the characters in a novel come to
life. The institution that puzzles intellectuals
so much can be explained by the mere material
fact (perceptible even to intellectuals) that
children are, generally speaking, younger than
their parents. " Till death do us part " is not
an irrational formula, for those will almost
certainly die before they see more than half
of the amazing (or alarming) thing they have
done.

Such is, in a curt and crude outline, this
obvious thing for those to whom it is not
obvious. Now I know there are thinking
men among those who would tamper with it ;
and I shall expect some of these to reply to
my questions. But for the moment I only
ask this question : whether the parliamentary
and journalistic divorce movement shows even
a shadowy trace of these fundamental truths,
regarded as tests. Does it even discuss the
nature of a vow, the limits and objects of

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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

loyalty, the survival of the family as a small
and free state ? The writers are content to
say that Mr, Brown is uncomfortable with
Mrs. Brown. And the last emancipation, for
separated couples, seems only to mean that he
is still uncomfortable without Mrs. Brown.
These are not days in which being uncomfort-
able is felt as the final test of public action.
For the regt, the reformers show statistically
that families are in fact so scattered in our
industrial anarchy, that they may as well
abandon hope of finding their way home again.
I am acquainted with that argument for making
bad worse, and I see it everywhere leading to
slavery. Because London Bridge is broken
down, we must assume that bridges are not
meant to bridge. Because London commer-
cialism and capitalism have copied hell, we are
to continue to copy them. Anyhow, some will
retain the conviction that the ancient bridge
built between the two towers of sex is the
worthiest of the great works of the earth.

It is exceedingly characteristic of the dreary
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THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

decades before the War that the forms of
freedom in which they seemed to specialise
were suicide and divorce. I am not at the
moment pronouncing on the moral problem of
either ; I am merely noting, as signs of those
times, those two true or false counsels of
despair ; the end of life and the end of love.
Other forms of freedom were being increasingly
curtailed. Freedom indeed was the one thing
that progressives and conservatives alike con-
temned. Socialists were largely concerned to
prevent strikes, by State arbitration ; that is,
by adding another rich man to give the casting
vote between rich and poor. Even in claiming
what they called the right to work, they tacitly
surrendered the right to leave off working.
Tories were preaching conscription, not so
much to defend the independence of England
as to destroy the independence of Englishmen.
Liberals, of course, were chiefly interested in
eliminating liberty, especially touching beer
and betting. It was wicked to fight, and un-
safe even to argue ; for citing any certain and

25

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

contemporary fact might land one in a libel
action. As all these doors were successfully
shut in our faces along the chilly and cheerless
corridor of progress (with its glazed tiles) the
doors of death and divorce alone stood open,
or rather opened wider and wider. I do not
expect the exponents of divorce to admit any
similarity in the two things ; yet the passing
parallel is not irrelevant. It may enable them
to realise the limits within which our moral
instincts can, even for the sake of argument,
treat this desperate remedy as a normal object
of desire. Divorce is for us at best a failure,
of which we are more concerned to find and
cure the cause than to complete the effects ;
and we regard a system that produces many
divorces as we do a system that drives men to
drown and shoot themselves. For instance, it
is perhaps the commonest complaint against
the existing law that the poor cannot afford to
avail themselves of it. It is an argument to
which normally I should listen with special
sympathy. But while I should condemn the

26

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

law being a luxury, my first thought will
naturally be that divorce and death 'are only
luxuries in a rather rare sense. I should not
primarily condole with the poor man on the
high price of prussic acid ; or on the fact that
all precipices of suitable suicidal height were
the private property of the landlords. There
are other high prices and high precipices I
should attack first. I should admit in the
abstract that what is sauce for the goose is
sa,uce for the gander ; that what is good for the
rich is good for the poor ; but my first and
strongest impression would be that prussic acid
sauce is not good for anybody. I fear I should,
on the impulse of the moment, pull a poor clerk
or artisan back by the coat-tails if he were
jumping over Shakespeare's Cliff, even if
Dover sands were strewn with the remains of
the dukes and bankers who had already taken
the plunge.

But in one respect, I will heartily concede,
the cult of divorce has differed from the mere
cult of death. The cult of death is dead.

27

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

Those I knew in my youth as young pessimists
are now aged optimists. And, what is more to
the point at present, even when it was living it
was limited ; it was a thing of one clique in one
class. We know the rule in the old comedy,
that when the heroine went mad in white satin,
the confidante went mad in white muslin. But
when, in some tragedy of the artistic tempera-
ment, the painter committed suicide in velvet,
it was never implied that the plumber must
commit suicide in corduroy. It was never held
that Hedda Gabler's housemaid must die in
torments on the carpet (trying as her term of
service may have been) ; or that Mrs. Tan-
queray's butler must play the Roman fool and
die on his own carving knife. That particular
form of playing the fool, Roman or otherwise,
was an oligarchic privilege in the decadent
epoch ; and even as such has largely passed
with that epoch. Pessimism, which was never
popular, is no longer even fashionable. A far
different fate has awaited the other fashion ;
the other somewhat dismal form of freedom.

28

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

If divorce is a disease, it is no longer to be a
fashionable disease like appendicitis ; it is to be
made an epidemic like small-pox. As we have
already seen, papers and public men to-day
make a vast parade of the necessity of setting
the poor man free to get a divorce. Now why
are they so mortally anxious that he should be
free to get a divorce, and not in the least
anxious that he should be free to get any-
thing else ? Why are the same people happy,
nay almost hilarious, when he gets a divorce,
who are horrified when he gets a drink ? What
becomes of his money, what becomes of his
children, where he works, when he ceases to
work, are less and less under his personal
control. Labour Exchanges, Insurance Cards,
Welfare Work, and a hundred forms of police
inspection and supervision, have combined for
good or evil to fix him more and more strictly
to a certain place in society. He is less and
less allowed to go to look for a new job ;
why is he allowed to go to look for a new
wife ? He is more and more compelled to

29

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

recognise a Moslem code about liquor ; why is
it made so easy for him to escape from his old
Christian code about sex ? What is the mean-
ing of this mysterious immunity, this special
permit for adultery ; and why is running away
with his neighbour's wife to be the only ex-
hilaration still left open to him ? Why must
he love as he pleases ; when he may not even
live as he pleases ?

The answer is, I regret to say, that this
social campaign, in most though by no means
all of its most prominent campaigners, relies
in this matter on a very smug and pestilent
piece of cant. There are some advocates of
democratic divorce who are really advocates
of general democratic freedom ; but they are
the exceptions ; I might say, with all respect,
that they are the dupes. The omnipresence
of the thing in the press and in political society
is due to a motive precisely opposite to the
motive professed. The modern rulers, who
are simply the rich men, are really quite con-
sistent in their attitude to the poor man. It is

30

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

the same spirit which takes away his children
under the pretence of order, which takes away
his wife under the pretence of liberty. That
which wishes, in the words of the comic song,
to break up the happy home, is primarily
anxious not to break up the much more un-
happy factory. Capitalism, of course, is at
war with the family, for the same reason which
has led to its being at war with the Trade
Union. This indeed is the only sense in which
it is true that capitalism is connected with indi-
vidualism. Capitalism believes in collectivism
for itself and individualism for its enemies.
It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in
other words) to be atoms. For the word atom,
in its clearest meaning (which is none too clear)
might be translated as " individual." If there
be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if
there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline,
by which the poor can help the poor, these
emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that
bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal
fashion. If there be such a brotherhood, these

31

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

individualistB will redistribute it in the form of
individuals ; or in other words smash it to
atoms.

The masters of modern plutocracy know
what they are about. They are making no
mistake ; they can be cleared of the slander of
inconsistency. A very profound and precise
instinct has led them to single out the human
household as the chief obstacle to their in-
human progress. Without the family we are
helpless before the State, which in our modern
case is the Servile State. To use a military
metaphor, the family is the only formation in
which the charge of the rich can be repulsed.
It is a force that forms twos as soldiers form
fours ; and, in every peasant country, has stood
in the square house or the square plot of land
as infantry have stood in squares against
cavalry. How this force operates thus, and
why, I will try to explain in the last of these
articles. But it is when it is most nearly ridden
down by the horsemen of pride and privilege,,
as in Poland or Ireland, when the battle grows

32

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

most desperate and the hope most dark, that
meii begin to understand why that wild oath in
its. beginnings was flung beyond the bounds of
the world ; and what would seem as passing as
a vision is made permanent as a vow.

33 D

Ill

There has long been a curiously consistent
attempt to conceal the fact that France is a
Christian country. There have been French-
men in the plot, no doubt , and no doubt there
have been Frenchmen — though I have myself
only found Englishmen — in the derivative
attempt to conceal the fact that Balzac was
a Christian writer. I began to read Balzac
long after I had read the admirers of Balzac ;
and they had never given me a hint of this
truth. I had read that his books were bound
in yellow and " quite impudently French " ;
though I may have been cloudy about why
being French should be impudent in a French-
man. I had read the truer description of " the
grimy wizard of the Comedie Humaine," and
have lived to learn the truth of it; Balzac

34

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

certainly is a genius of the type of that artist
he himself describes, who could draw a broom-
stick so that one knew it had swept the room
after a murder. The furniture of Balzac is
more alive than the figures of many dramas.
For this I was prepared ; but not for a certain
spiritual assumption which I recognised at
once as a historical phenomenon. The morality
of a great writer is not the morality he teaches,
but the morality he takes for granted. The
Catholic type of Christian ethics runs through
Balzac's books, exactly as the Puritan type of
Christian ethics runs through Bunyan's books.
What his professed opinions were I do not
know, any more than I know Shakespeare's ;
but I know that both those great creators of
a multitudinous world made it, as compared
with other and later writers, on the same
fundamental moral plan as the universe of
Dante. There can be no doubt about it for
any one who can apply as a test the truth I
have mentioned ; that the fundamental things
in a man are not the things he explains, but

35

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

rather the things he forgets to explain. But
here and there Balzac does explain ; and
with that intellectual concentration Mr. George
Moore has acutely observed in that novelist
when he is a theorist. And the other day I
found in one of Balzac's novels this passage ;
which, ^yhether or no it would precisely hit
Mr. George Moore's mood at this moment,
strikes me as a perfect prophecy of this epoch,
and might almost be a motto for this book.
" With the solidarity of the family society has
lost that elemental force which Montesquieu
defined and called 'honour.' Society has
isolated its members the better to govern
them, and has divided in order to weaken."

Throughout our youth and the years before
the War, the current criticism followed Ibsen
in describing the domestic system as a doll's
house and the domestic woman as a doll.
Mr. Bernard Shaw varied the metaphor by
saying that mere custom kept the woman in
the home as it keeps the parrot in the cage ;
and the plays and tales of the period made vivid

36

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

sketches of a woman who also resembled a parrot
in other particulars, rich in raiment, shrill in
accent and addicted to saying over and over
again what she had been taught to say. Mr.
Granville Barker, the spiritual child of Mr.
Bernard Shaw, commented in his clever play
of "The Voysey Inheritance" on tyranny,
hypocrisy and boredom, as the constituent
elements of a " happy English home." Leav-
ing the truth of this aside for the moment, it
will be well to insist that the conventionality
thus criticised would be even more characteristic
of a happy French home. It Is not the
Englishman's house, but the Frenchman's
house that is his castle. It might be further
added, touching the essential ethical view of the
sexes at least, that the Irishman's house is his
castle ; though it has been for some centuries a
besieged castle. Anyhow, those conventions
■which were remarked as making domesticity
dull, narrow and unnaturally meek and
submissive, are particularly powerful among the
Irish and the French. From this it will surely

37

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

be easy, for any lucid and logical thinker, to
deduce the fact that the French are dull and
narrow, and that the Irish are unnaturally meek
and submissive. Mr. Bernard Shaw, being an
Irishman who lives among Englishmen, may be
conveniently taken as the type of the difference ;
and it will no doubt be found that the political
friends of Mr. Shaw, among Englishmen, will
be of a wilder revolutionary type than those
whom he would have found among Irishmen.
We are in a position to compare the meekness
of the Fenians with the fury of the Fabians.
This deadening monogamic ideal may even, in
a larger sense, define and distinguish all the flat
subserviency of Clare from all the flaming revolt
of Clapham. Nor need we now look far to
understand why revolutions have been unknown
in the history of France ; or why they happen
so persistently in the vaguer politics of England.
This rigidity and respectability must surely be
the explanation of all that incapacity for any
civil experiment or explosion, which has always
marked that sleepy hamlet of very private

38

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

private houses, which we call the city of Paris.
But the same things are true not only of
Parisians but of peasants ; they are even true
of other peasants in the great Alliance.
Students of Serbian traditions tell us that the
peasant literature lays a special and singular
curse on the violation of marriage ; and this may
well explain the prim and sheepish pacifism
complained of in that people.

In plain words, there is clearly something
wrong in the calculation by which it was proved
that a housewife must be as much a servant as
a housemaid ; or which exhibited the domesti-
cated man as being as gentle as the primrose
or as conservative as the Primrose League. It
is precisely those who have been conservative
about the family who have been revolutionary
about the state. Those who are blamed for
the bigotry or bourgeois smugness of their
marriage conventions are actually those blamed
for the restlessness and violence of their
political reforms. Nor is there seriously any
difficulty in discovering the cause of this. It is

39

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

simply that in such a society the government,
in dealing with the family, deals with something
almost as permanent and self-renewing as itself.
There can be a continuous family policy, like a
continuous foreign policy. In peasant countries
the family fights , it may almost be said that
the farm fights. I do not mean merely that it
riots in evil and exceptional times ; though this
is not unimportant. It was a savage but a sane
feature when, in the Irish evictions, the women
poured hot water from the windows ; it was
part of a final falling back on private tools as
public weapons. That sort of thing is not only
war to the knife, but almost war to the fork and
spoon. It was in this grim sense perhaps that
Parnell, in that mysterious pun, said that Kettle
was a household word in Ireland (it certainly
ought to be after its subsequent glories), and in
a more general sense it is certain that meddling
with the housewife will ultimately mean getting
into hot water. But it is not of such crises of
bodily struggle that I speak, but of a steady
and peaceful pressure from below of a thousand

40

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

families upon the framework of government.
For this a certain spirit of defence and enclosure
is essential ; and even feudalism was right in
feeling that any such affair of honour must be a
family affair. It was a true artistic instinct
that pictured the pedigree on a coat that pro-
tects the body. The free peasant has arms if
he has not armorial bearings. He has not an
escutcheon ; but he has a shield. Nor do I see
why, in a freer and happier society than the
present, or even the past, it should not be a
blazoned shield. For that is true of pedigree
which is true of property; the wrong is not in
its being imposed on men, but rather in its being
denied to them. Too much capitalism does
not mean too many capitalists, but too few
capitalists ; and so aristocracy sins, not in plant-
ing a family tree, but in not planting a family
forest.

Anyhow, it is found in practice that the
domestic citizen can stand a siege, even by the
State ; because he has those who will stand by
him. through thick and thin — especially thin.

41

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

Now those who hold that the State can be made
fit to own all and administer all, can consistently
disregard this argument; but it may be said
with all respect that the world is more and more
disregarding them. If we could find a perfect
machine, and a perfect man to work it, it might
be a good argument for State Socialism, though
an equally good argument for personal des-
potism. But most of us, I fancy, are now
agreed that something of that social pressure
from below which we call freedom is vital to
the health of the state ; and this it is which
cannot be fully exercised by individuals, but
only by groups and traditions. Such groups
have been many ; there have been monasteries ;
there may be guilds ; but there is only one type
among them which all human beings have a
spontaneous and omnipresent inspiration to
build for themselves ; and this type is the
family.

I had intended this article to be the last of
those outlining the elements of this debate ; but
I shall have to add a short concluding section

42

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

on the way in which all this is missed in the
practical (or rather unpractical) proposals about
divorce. Here I will only say that they suffer
from the modern and morbid weakness of always
sacrificing the normal to the abnormal. As a
fact the " tyranny, hypocrisy and boredom "
complained of are not domesticity, but the decay
of domesticity. The case of that particular
complaint, in Mr. Granville Barker's play, is
itself a proof. The whole point of " The
Voysey Inheritance" was that there was no
Voysey inheritance. The only heritage of that
family was a highly dishonourable debt.
Naturally their family affections had decayed
when their whole ideal of property and probity
had decayed ; and there was little love as well
as little honour among thieves. It has yet to
be proved that they would have been as much
bored if they had had a positive and not a
negative heritage ; and had worked a farm
instead of a fraud. And the experience of
mankind points the other way.

43

IV

I HAVE touched before now on a famous or
infamous Royalist who suggested that the
people should eat grass ; an unfortunate
remark perhaps for a Royalist to make ; since
the regimen is only recorded of a Royal
Personage. But there was certainly a sim-
plicity in the solution worthy of a sultan or
even a savage chief ; and it is this touch of
autocratic innocence on which I have mainly
insisted touching the social reforms of our day,
and especially the social reform known as
divorce. I am primarily more concerned with
the arbitrary method than with the anarchic
result. Very much as the old tyrant would
turn aniy number of men out to grass, so the
new tyrant would turn any number of women
into grass-widows. Anyhow, to vary the

44

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

legendary symbolism, it never seems to occur
to the king in this fairy tale that the gold
crown oh his head is a less, and not a more,
sacred and settled ornament than the gold ring
on the woman's finger. This change is being
achieved by the summary and even secret
government which we now suffer; and this
■would be the first point against it, even if it were
really an emancipation ; and it is only in form an
.emancipation. I will not anticipate the details
of its defence, which can be offered by others,
but I will here conclude for the present by
roughly suggesting the practical defences of
divorce, as generally given just at present,
under four heads. And I vvill only ask the
reader" to note that they all have one thing in
common : the fact that each argument is also
used for all that social reform which plain men
are already calling slavery.

First, it is very typical of the latest practical
proposals that they are concerned with the
case of those who are already separated, and
the steps they must take tor be divorced.

45

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

There is a spirit penetrating all our society
to-day by which the exception is allowed to
alter the rule ; the exile to deflect patriotism,
the orphan to depose parenthood, and even the
widow or, in this case as we have seen
the grass-widow, to destroy the position of the
wife. There is a sort of symbol of this
tendency in that mysterious and unfortunate
nomadic nation which has been allowed to
alter so many things, from a crusade in Russia
to a cottage in South Bucks. We have been
told to treat the wandering Jew as a pilgrim,
while we still treat the wandering Christian as
a vagabond. And yet the latter is at least
trying to get home, like Ulysses ; whereas the
former is, if anything, rather fleeing from home,
like Cain. He who is detached, disgruntled,
nondescript, intermediate, is everywhere made
the excuse for altering what is common,
corporate, traditional and popular. And the
alteration is always fox the worse. The
mermaid never becomes more womanly, but
only more fishy. The centaur never becomes

46

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

more manly, but only more horsy. The Jew
cannot really internationalise Christendom ;
he can only denationalise Christendom. The
proletarian does not find it easy to become
a small proprietor ; he is finding it far easier
to become a slave. So the unfortunate man,
who cannot tolerate the woman he has chosen
from all the women of the world, is not
encouraged to return to her and tolerate her,
but encouraged to choose another woman
whom he may in due course refuse to tolerate.
And in all these cases the argument is the
same ; that the man in the intermediate state
is unhappy. Probably he is unhappy, since
he is abnormal ; but the point is that he is
permitted to loosen the universal bond which
has kept millions of others normal. Because
he has himself got into a hole, he is allowed to
burrow in it like a rabbit and undermine a
whole countryside.

Next we have, as we always have touching
such crude experiments, an argument from the
example of other countries, and especially of

47

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

new countries. Thus the Eugenists ,tell me
solemnly that there have been very successful
Eugenic experiments in America. And they
rigidly retain their solemnity (while refusing
with many rebukes to believe in mine), when
I tellthem that one of the Eugenic experi-
ments in America is a chemical experiment ;
which consists of changing a black man into
the.allotropic form of white ashes. It is really
an exceedingly Eugenic experiment ; since its
chief object is to discourage an inter-raci^l
mixture of blood which is not desired. But I
do not like this American experiment, however
American ; and I trust and believe that it
is not typically American at all. It represents,
I conceive, only one element in the complexity
of the great democracy ; and goes along with
other evil elements ; so that I am not at all
surprised that the same strange social sections,
which permit a human being to be burned
alive, also permit the exalted science of
Eugenics. It is the same in the milder matter
of liquor laws ; and we are told that certain

48

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

. ^ ■ — — '

rather crude colonials have established pro-
hibition laws, which they try to evade ; just as
we are told they have established divorce
laws, which they are now trying to repeal.
For in this case of divorce, at least, the
argument from distant precedents has recoiled
crushingly upon itself. There is already an
agitation for less divorce in America, even while
there is an agitation for more divorce in
England.

Again, when an argument is based on a
need of population, it will be well if those
supporting it realise where it may carry them.
It is exceedingly doubtful whether population
is one of the advantages of divorce ; but there
is no doubt that it is one of the advantages of
polygamy. It is already used in Germany as
an argument for polygamy. But the very
word will teach us to look even beyond
Germany for something yet more remote and
repulsive. Mere population, along with a sort
of polygamous anarchy, will not appear even
as a practical ideal to any one who considers,

49 E

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

for instance, how consistently Europe has held
the headship of the human race, in face of the
chaotic myriads of Asia. If population were
the chief test of progress and efificiency, China
would long ago have proved itself the most
progressive and efficient state. De Quincey
summed up the whole of that enormous situa-
tion, in a sentence which is perhaps more
impressive and even appalling than all the
perspectives of orient architecture and vistas
of opium vision in the midst of which it comes.
" Man is a weed in those regions," Many
Europeans, fearing for the garden of the world,
have fancied that in some future fatality those
weeds may spring up and choke it. But no
Europeans have really wished that the flowers
should become like the weeds.. Even if it
were true, therefere, that the loosening of the
tie necessarily increased the population ; even
if this were not contradicted, as it is, by the
facts of many countries, we should have
strong historical grounds for not accepting the
deduction. We should still be suspicious of

50

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

the paradox that we may encourage large
families by abolishing the family.

Lastly, I believe it is part of the defence of
the new proposal that even its defenders have
found its principle a little too crude. I hear
they have added provisions which modify the
principle ; and'which seem to be in substance,
first, that a man shall be made responsible for
a money payment to the wife he deserts, and
second, that the matter shall once again be
submitted in some fashion to some magistrate.
For my purpose here, it is enough to note
that there is something of the unmistakable
savour of the sociology we resist, in these two
touching acts of faith, in a cheque-book and in
a lawyer. Most of the fashionable reformers
of marriage would be faintly shocked at any
suggestion that a poor old charwoman might
possibly refuse such money, or that a good kind
magistrate might not have the right to give
such advice. For the reformers of marriage
are very respectable people, with some honour-
able exceptions ] and nothing could fit more

51

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

smoothly into the rather greasy groove of
their respectability than the suggestion that
treason is best treated with the damages,
gentlemen, heavy damages, of Mr. Serjeant
Buzfuz ; or that tragedy is best treated by the
spiritual arbitrament of Mr. Nupkins.

One word should be added to this hasty
sketch of the elements of the case. I have
deliberately left out the loftiest aspect and
argument, that which sees marriage as a divine
institution ; and that for the logical reason
that those who believe in this would not
believe in divorce ; and I am arguing with
those who do believe in divorce. I do not
ask them to assume the worth of my creed or
any creed ; and I could wish they did not so
often ask me to assume the worth of their
worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society.
But if it could be shown, as I think it can,
that a long historical view and a patient
political experience can at last accumulate solid
scientific evidence of the vital need of such
a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous

52

THE SUPERSTITION OF DIVORCE

tribute than this, to any faith, which made a
flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings,
ot what the latest enlightenment can only
slowly discover in the end.

53

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

The most ancient of human institutions has an
authority that may seem as wild as anarchy.
Alone among all such institutions it begins
with a spontaneous attraction ; and may be
said strictly and not sentimentally to be founded
on love instead of fear. The attempt to com-
pare it with coercive institutions complicating
later history has led to infinite illogicality in
later times. It is as unique as it is universal.
There is nothing in any other social relations
in any way parallel to the mutual attraction of
the sexes. By missing this simple point, the
modern world has fallen into a hundred follies.
The idea of a general revolt of women against
men has been, proclaimed with flags and pro-
cessions, like a revolt of vassals against their
lords, of niggers against nigger-drivers, of Poles

57

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

against Prussians or Irishmen against English-
men ; for all the world as if we really believed
in the fabulous nation of the Amazons. The
equally philosophical idea of a general revolt
of men against women has been put into a
romance by Sir Walter Besant, and into a
sociological book by Mr. Belfort Bax. But at
the first touch of this truth of an aboriginal
attraction, all such comparisons collapse and
are seen to be comic. A Prussian does not
feel from the first that he can only be happy if
he spends his days and nights with a Pole. An
Englishman does not think his house empty
and cheerless unless it happens to contain an
Irishman. A white man does not in his
romantic youth dream of the perfect beauty of
a black man. A railway magnate seldom writes
poems about the personal fascination of a rail-
way porter. All the other revolts against all
the other relations are reasonable and even
inevitable, because those relations are originally
only founded upon force or self-interest. Force
can abolish what force can establish ; self-

58

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

interest can terminate a contract when self-
interest has dictated the contract. But the love
of man and woman is not an institution that
can be abolished, or a contract that can be
terminated. It is something older than all
institutions or contracts, and something that is
certain to outlast them all. All the other
revolts are real, because there remains a possi-
bility that the things may be destroyed, or at
least divided. You can abolish capitalists ;
but you cannot abolish males. Prussians can
go out of Poland or negroes can be repatriated
to Africa ; bvit a man and a woman must remain
together in one way or another; and must
learn to put up with each other somehow.

These are very simple truths ; that is why
nobody nowadays seems to take any particular
notice of them ; and the truth that follows next
is equally obvious. There is no dispute about
the purpose of Nature in creating such an
attraction. It would be more intelligent to call
it the purpose of God ; for Nature can have no
purpose unless God is behind it. To talk of

59

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

the purpose of Nature is to make a vain attempt
to avoid being anthropomorphic merely by
being feminist. It is believing in a goddess
because you are too sceptical to believe in a
god. But this is a controversy which can be
kept apart from the question, if we content
ourselves with saying that the vital value
ultimately found in this attraction is, of course,
the renewal of the race itself. The child is an
explanation of the father and mother ; and the
fact that it is a human child is the explanation
of the ancient human ties connecting the father
and mother. The more human, that is the less
bestial, is the child, the more lawful and lasting
are the ties. So far from any progress in
culture or the sciences tending to loosen the
bond, any such progress must logically tend to
tighten it. The more things there are for the
child to learn, the longer he must remain at
the natural school for learning them : and the
longer his teachers must at least postpone the
dissolution of their partnership. This ele-
mentary truth is hidden to-day in vast masses

60

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

of vicarious, indirect and artificial work, with
the fundamental fallacy of which I shall deal
i;i a moment. Here I speak of the primary
position of the human group, as it has stood
through unthinkable ages of waxing and waning
civilisations ; often unable to delegate any of
its work, always unable to delegate all of it.
In this, I repeat, it will always be necessary for
the two teachers to remain together, in pro-
portion as they have anything to teach. One
of the shapeless sea-beasts, that merely detaches
itself from its offspring and floats away, could
float away to a submarine divorce court, or an
advanced club founded on free-love for fishes.
The sea-beast might do this, precisely because
the sea-beast's offspring need do nothing ;
because it has not got to learn the polka or the
multiplication table. All these are truisms,
but they are also truths, and truths that will
return ; for the present tangle of semi-official
substitutes is not only a stop-gap, but one that
is not big enough to stop the gap. If people
cannot mind their own business, it cannot

6i

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

possibly be more economical to pay them to
mind each other's business ; and still less to
mind each other's babies. It is simply throwing
away a natural force and then paying for an
artificial force ; as if a man were to water a
plant with a hose while holding up an umbrella
to protect it from the rain. The whole really
rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite
supply of servants. When we offer any
other system as a " career for women," we
are really proposing that an infinite number of
them should become servants, of a plutocratic
or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are argu-
ing that a woman should not be a mother to
her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody
else's jbaby. But it will not work, even on
paper. We cannot all live by taking in each
other's washing, especially in the form of
pinafores. In the last resort, the only people
who either can or will give individual care, to
each of the individual children, are their indi-
vidual parents. The expression cis applied
to those dealing with changing crowds of

62

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

children is a graceful and legitimate flourish of
speech.

This triangle of truisms, of father, mother
and child, cannot be destroyed ; it can only
destroy those civilisations which disregard it.
Most modern reformers are merely bottomles s
sceptics, and have no basis on which to rebuild ;
and it is well that such reformers should realise
that there is something they cannot reform.
You can put down the mighty from their seat ;
you can turn the world upside down, and there
is much to be said for the view that it may then
be the right way up. But you cannot create a
world in which the baby carries the mother.
You cannot create a world in which the mother
has not authority over the baby. You can
waste your time in trying ; by giving votes to
babies or proclaiming a republic of infants in
arms. You can say, as an educationist said the
other day, that small children should " criticise,
question, authority and suspend their judg-
ment." I do not know why he did not go on
to say that they should earn their own living,

63

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

pay income tax to the state, and die in battle
for the fatherland ; for the proposal evidently
is that children shall have no childhood. But
you can, if you find entertainment in such
games, organise "representative government"
among little boys and girls, and tell them to
take their legal and constitutional responsi-
bilities as seriously as possible. In short, you
can be crazy ; but you cannot be consistent.
You cannot really carry your own principle
back to the aboriginal group, and really apply
it to the mother and the baby. You will not
act on your own theory in the simplest and
most practical of all possible cases. You are
not quite so mad as that.

This nucleus of natural authority has always
existed in the midst of more artificial authorities.
It has always been regarded as something in
the literal sense individual ; that is as an
absolute that could not really be divided. A
baby was not even a baby apart from its
mother ; it was something else, most probably
a corpse. It was always recognised as standing

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

in a peculiar relation to government ; simply
because it was one of the few things that had
not been made by government ; and could to
some extent come into existence without the
support of government. Indeed the case for
it is too strong to be stated. For the case for
it that there is nothing like it ; and we can only
find faint parallels to it in those more elaborate
and painful powers and institutions that are its
inferiors. Thus the only way of conveying it is
to compare it to a nation ; although, compared
to it, national divisions are as modern and formal
as national anthems. Thus I may often use
the metaphor of a city ; though in its presence
a citizen is as recent as a city clerk. It is
enough to note here that everybody does know
by intuition and admit by implication that a
family is a solid fact, having a character and
colour like a nation. The truth can be tested
by the most modern and most daily experiences.
A man does say " That is the sort of thing the
Browns will like " ; however tangled and
interminable a psychological novel he might

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

compose on the shades of difference between
Mr, and Mrs. Brown. A woman does say " I
don't like Jemima seeing so much of the
Robinsons " ; and she does not always, in the
scurry of hqr social or domestic duties, pause^
to distinguish the optimistic materialism of Mrs.
Robinson from the more acid cynicism which
tinges the hedonism of Mr. Robinson. There is
a colour of the household inside, as conspicuous
as the colour of the house outside. That colour
is a blend, and if any tint in it predominates it
is generally that preferred by Mrs. Robinson.
But like all composite colours, it is a separate
colour ; as separate as green is from blue and
yellow. Every marriage is a sort of wild
balance ; and in every case the compromise is
as unique as an eccentricity. Philanthropists
walking in the slums often see the compromise
in the street, and mistake it for a fight. When
they interfere, they are thoroughly thumped by
both parties ; and serve them right, for not
respecting the very institution that brought
them into the world.

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

The first thing to see is that this enormous
normality is lilce a mountain ; and one that is
capable of being a volcano. Every abnormality
that is now opposed to it is like a mole-hill ; and
the earnest sociological organisers of it are
exceedingly like moles. But the mountain is a
volcano in another sense also ; as suggested in
that tradition of the southern fields fertilised by
larva. It has a creative as well as a destructive
side; and it only remains, in this part of the
analysis, to note the political effect of this extra-
politicar institution, and the political ideals of
which it has been the champion ; and perhaps
the only permanent champion.

The ideal for which it stands in the state is
liberty. It stands for liberty for the very simple
reason with which this rough analysis started.
It is the only one of these institutions that is at
once necessary and voluntary. It is the only
check on the state that is bound to renew itself
as eternally as the state, and more naturally
than the state. Every sane man recognises
that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is

67

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give
the citizen a province of liberty ; a limitation
within which a citizen is a king. This is the only
way in which truth can ever find refuge from
public persecution, and the good man survive
the bad government. But the good man by
himself is no match for the bad government.
The citizen by himself is no match for the city.
There must be balanced against it another ideal
institution, and in that sense an immortal institu-
tion. So long as the state is the only ideal
institution the state will call on the citizen to
sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the
smallest scruple in sacrificing the citizen. The
state consists of coercion ; and must always be
justified from its own point of view in extending
the bounds of coercion ; as, for instance, in the
case of conscription. The only thing that can be
set up to check or challenge this authority is a
voluntary law and a voluntary loyalty. That
loyalty is the protection of liberty, in the only
sphere where liberty can fully dwell. It is a
principle of the constitution that the King never

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

dies. It is the whole principle of the family
that the citizen never dies. There must be a
heraldry and heredity of freedom ; a tradition
of resistance to tyranny. A man must be not
only free, but free-born.

Indeed, there is something in the family
that might loosely be called anarchist ; and
more correctly called amateur. As there seems
something almost vague about its voluntary
origin, so there seems something vague about
its voluntary organisation. The most vital
function it perforrns, perhaps the most vital
function that anything can perform, is that of
education ; but its type of early education is far
too essential to be mistaken for instruction. In a
thousand things it works rather by rule of thumb
than rule of theory. To take a common-place
and even comic example, I doubt if any text-
book or code of rules has ever contained any
directions about standing a child in a corner.
Doubtless when the modern process is complete,
and the coercive principle of the state has
entirely extinguished the voluntary element of

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

the family, there will be some exact regulation
or restriction about the matter. Possibly it
will say that the corner must be an angle of at
least ninety-five degrees. Possibly it will say
that the converging line of any ordinary corner
tends to make a child squint. In fact I am
certain that if I said casually, at a sufficient
number of tea-tables, that corners made
children squint, it would rapidly become a
universally received dogma of popular science.
For the modern world will accept no dogmas
upon any authority ; but it will accept any
dogmas upon no authority. Say that a thing
is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and
it will be dismissed as a superstition without
examination. But preface your remark merely
with " they say " or " don't you know that — .'' "
or try (and fail) to remember the name of some
professor mentioned in some newspaper ; and
the keen rationalism of the modern mind will
accept every word you say. This parenthesis
is not so irrelevant as it may appear ; for it
will be well to remember that when a rigid

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

officialism breaks in upon the voluntary com-
promises of the home, that officialism itself will
be only rigid in its action and will be exceed-
ingly limp in its thought. Intellectually it will
be at least as vague as the amateur arrange-
ments of the home, and the only difference is
that the domestic arrangements are in the only
real sense practical ; that is, they are founded
on experiences that have been suffered. The
others are what is now generally called
scientific ; that is, they are founded on experi-
ments that have not yet been made. As a
matter of fact, instead of invading the family
with the blundering bureaucracy that mis-
manages the public services, it would be far
more philosophical to work the reform the
other way round. It would be really quite as
reasonable to alter the laws of the nation
so as to resemble the laws of the nursery.
The punishments would be far less horrible, far
more humorous, and far more really calculated
to make men feel they had made fools of them-
selves. It would be a pleasant change if a

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

judge, instead of putting on the black cap, had
to put on the dunce's cap ; or if we could stand
a financier in his own corner.

Of course this opinion is rare, and re-
actionary— whatever that may mean. Modern
education is founded on the principle that a
parent is more likely to be cruel than anybody
else. It passes over the obvious fact that he
is less likely to be cruel than anybody else.
Anybody may happen to be cruel ; but the
first chances of cruelty come with the whole
colourless and indifferent crowd of total
strangers and mechanical mercenaries, whom it
is now the custom to call in as infallible agents
of improvement ; policemen, doctors, detectives,
inspectors, instructors, and so on. They are
automatically given arbitrary power because
there are here and there such things as criminal
parents ; as if there were no such things as
criminal doctors or criminal schoolmasters.
A mother is not always judicious about her
child's diet ; so it is given into the control of
Dr. Crippen. A father is thought not to teach

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

his sons the purest morality ; so they are put
under the tutorship of Eugene Aram. These
celebrated criminals are no more rare in their
respective professions than the cruel parents are
in the profession of parenthood. But indeed
the case is far stronger than this ; and there is
no need to rely on the case of such criminals
at all. The ordinary weaknesses of human
nature will explain all the weakness of bureau-
cracy and business government all over the
world. The official need only be an ordinary
man to be more indifferent to other people's
children than to his own ; and even to sacrifice
other people's family prosperity to his own.
He may be bored ; he may be bribed ; he may
be brutal, for any one of the thousand reasons
that ever made a man a brute. All this
elementary common sense is entirely left out of
account in our educational and social systems
of to-day. It is assumed that the hireling will
not flee, and that solely because he is a hire-
ling. It is denied that the shepherd will lay
down his life for the sheep ; or for that matter,

12>

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

even that the she-wolf will fight for the cubs.
We are to believe that mothers are inhuman ;
but not that officials are human. There are
unnatural parents, but there are no natural
passions ; at least, there are none where the
fury of King Lear dared to find them — in the
beadle. Such is the latest light on the
education of the young ; and the same principle
that is applied to the child is applied to the
husband and wife. Just as it assumes that a
child will certainly be loved by anybody
except his mother, so it assumes that a
man can be happy with anybody except
the one woman he has himself chosen for
his wife.

Thus the coercive spirit of the state prevails
over the free promise of the family, in the
shape of formal officialism. But this is not
the most coercive of the coercive elements in
the modern commonwealth. An even more
rigid and ruthless external power is that of
industrial employment and unemployment. An
even more ferocious enemy of the family is

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

the factory. Between these modern mechanical
things the ancient natural institution is not
being reformed or modified or even cut down ;
it is being torn in pieces. It is not only being
torn in pieces in the sense of a true metaphor,
like a living thing caught in a hideous clock-
work of manufacture. It is being literally torn
in pieces, in that the husband may go to one
factory, the wife to another, and the child to
a third. Each will become the servant of a
separate financial group, which is more and
more gaining the political power of a feudal
group. But whereas feudalism received the
loyalty of families, the lords of the new servile
state will receive only the loyalty of individuals ;
that is, of lonely men and even of lost children.
It is sometimes said that Socialism attacks
the family ; which is founded on little beyond
the accident that some Socialists believe in
free-love. I have been a Socialist, and I am
no longer a Socialist, and at no time did I
believe in free-love. It is true, I think in a
larger and unconscious sense, that State

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THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

Socialism encourages the general coercive
claim I have been considering. But if it be
true that Socialism attacks the family in theory,
it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks
it in practice. It is a paradox, but a plain
fact, that men never notice a thing as long as it
exists in practice. Men who will note a heresy
will ignore an abuse. Let any one who doubts
the paradox imagine the newspapers formally
printing along with the Honours List a price
list, for peerages and knighthoods ; though
everybody knows they are bought and sold.
So the factory is destroying the family in fact ;
and need depend on no poor mad theorist who
dreams of destroying it in fancy. And what
is destroying it is nothing so plausible as free-
love ; but something rather to be described as
an enforced fear. It is economic punishment
more terrible than legal punishment, which
may yet land us in slavery as the only safety.

From its first days in the forest, this human
group had to fight against wild monsters ; and
so it is now fighting against these wild

76

THE STORY OF THE FAMILY

machines. It only managed to survive then,
and it will only manage to survive now, by a
strong internal sanctity ; a tacit oath or dedica-
tion deeper than that of the city or the tribe.
But though this silent promise was always
present, it took at a certain turning point of
our history a special form which I shall try to
sketch in the next chapter. That turning point
was the creation of Christendom by the religion
which created it. Nothing will destroy the
sacred triangle ; and even the Christian faith,
the most amazing revolution that ever took
place in the mind, served only in a sense to
turn that triangle upside down. It held up
a mystical mirror in which the order of the
three things was reversed ; and added a holy
family of child, mother, and father to the
human family of father, mother, and child.

n

THE STORY OF THE VOW

THE STORY OF THE VOW

Charles Lamb, with his fine fantastic instinct
for combinations that are also contrasts, has
noted somewhere a contrast between St. Valen-
tine and valentines. There seems a comic
incongruity in such lively and frivolous flirta-
tions still depending on the date and title of
an ascetic and celibate bishop of the Dark
Ages. The paradox lends itself to his treat-
ment, and there is a truth in his view of it.
Perhaps it may seem even more of a paradox
to say there is no paradox. In such cases
unification appears more provocative than
division ; and it may seem idly contradictory
to deny the contradiction. And yet in truth
there is no contradiction. In the deepest
sense there is a very real similarity, which

8i G

THE STORY OF THE VOW

puts St. Valentine and his valentines on one
side, and most of the modern world on the
other. I should hesitate to ask even a German
professor to collect, collate and study carefully
all the valentines in the world, with the object
of tracing a philosophical principle running
through them. But if he did, I have no doubt
about the philosophic principle he would find.
However trivial, however imbecile, however
vulgar or vapid or stereotyped the imagery
of such things might be, it would always
involve one idea, the same idea that makes
lovers laboriously chip their initials on a tree
or a rock, in a sort of monogram of monogamy.
It may be a cockney trick to tie one's love
on a tree; though Orlando did it, and would
now doubtless be arrested by the police for
breaking the bye-laws of the Forest of Arden,
I am not here concerned especially to commend
the habit of cutting one's own name and private
address in large letters on the front of the
Parthenon, across the face of the Sphinx, or
in any other nook or corner where it may

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THE STORY OF THE VOW

chance to arrest the sentimental interest of
posterity. But like many other popular things,
of the sort that can generally be found in
Shakespeare, there is a meaning in it that
would probably be missed by a less popular
poet, like Shelley. There is a very permanent
truth in the fact that two free persons deliber-
ately tie themselves to a log of wood. And
it is the idea of tying oneself to something
that runs through all this old amorous allegory
like a pattern of fetters. There is always the
notion of hearts chained together, or skewered
together, or in some manner secured ; there
is a security that can only be called captivity.
That it frequently fails to secure itself has
nothing to do with the present point. The
point is that every philosophy of sex must
fail, which does not account for its ambition of
fixity, as well as for its experience of failure.
There is nothing to make Orlando commit
himself on the sworn evidence of the nearest
tree. He is not bound to be bound; he is
under constraint, but nobody constrains him

83

THE STORY OF THE VOW

to be under constraint. In short, Orlando
took a vow to marry precisely as Valentine
took a vow not to marry. Nor could any
ascetic, without being a heretic, have asserted
in the wildest reactions of asceticism, that the
vow of Orlando was not lawful as well as the
vow of Valentine. But it is a notable fact that
even when it was not lawful, it was still a vow.
Through all that mediaeval culture, which has
left us the legend of romance, there ran this
pattern of a chain, which was felt as binding
even where it ought not to bind. The lawless
loves of mediaeval legends all have their own
law, and especially their own loyalty, as in the
tales of Tristram or Lancelot. In this sense
we might say that mediaeval profligacy was
more fixed than modern marriage. I am not
here discussing either modern or mediaeval
ethics, in the matter of what they did say or
ought to say of such things. I am only noting as
a historical fact the insistence of the mediaeval
imagination, even at its wildest, upon one
particular idea. That idea is the idea of the

84

THE STORY OF THE VOW

vow. It might be the vow which St, Valentine
took ; it might be a lesser vow which he re-
garded as lawful ; it might be a wild vow which
he regarded as quite lawless. But the whole
society which made such festivals and be-
queathed to us such traditions was full of the
idea of vows ; and we must recognise this
notion, even if we think it nonsensical, as the
note of the whole civilisation. And Valentine
and the valentine both express it for us ; even
more if we feel them both as exaggerated, or
even as exaggerating opposites. Those ex-
tremes meet ; and they meet in the same place.
Their trysting place is by the tree on which
the lover hung his love-letters. And even if
the lover hung himself on the tree, instead of
his literary compositions, even that act had
about it also an indefinable flavour of finality.

It is often said by the critics of Christian
origins that certain ritual feasts, processions
or dances are really of pagan origin. They
might as well say that our legs are of pagan
origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity

85

THE STORY OF THE VOW

was human before it was Christian ; and no
Church manufactured the legs with which men
walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or
a ballet. What can really be maintained, so
as to carry not a little conviction, is this :
that where such a Church has existed it has
preserved not only the processions but the
dances ; not only the cathedral but the carnival.
One of the chief claims of Christian civilisation
is to have preserved things of pagan origin.
In short, in the old religious countries men
continue to dance ; while in the new scientific
cities they are often content to drudge.

But when this saner view of history is
realised, there does remain something more
mystical and difficult to define. Even heathen
things are Christian when they have been
preserved by Christianity. Chivalry is some-
thing recognisably different even from the
virtus of Virgil. Charity is something exceed-
ingly different from the plain pity of Homer.
Even our patriotism is something more subtle
than the undivided love of the city ; and the

86

THE STORY OF THE VOW

change is felt in the most permanent things,
such as the love of landscape or the love of
woman. To define the differentiation in all
these things will always be hopelessly difficult.
But I would here suggest one element in the
change which is perhaps too much neglected »
which at any rate ought not to be negle<:ted ;
the nature of a vow. I might express it by
saying that pagan antiquity was the age of
status ; that Christian medisevalism was the
age of vows ; and that sceptical modernity has
been the age of contracts ; or rather has tried
to be, and has failed.

The outstanding example of status was
slavery. Needless to say slavery does not
mean tyranny ; indeed it need only be regarded
relatively to other things to be regarded as
charity. The idea of slavery is that large
numbers of men are meant and made to do
the heavy work of the world, and that others,
while taking the margin of profits, must never-
theless support them while they do it. The
point is not whether the work is excessive or

87

THE STORY OF THE VOW

moderate, or whether the condition is comfort-
able or uncomfortable. The point is that his
work is chosen for the man, his status fixed
for the man ; and this status is forced on him
by law. As Mr. Balfour said about Socialism,
that is slavery and nothing else is slavery.
The slave might well be, and often was, far
more comfortable than the average free
labourer ; and certainly far more lazy than
the average peasant. He was a slave because
he had not reached his position by choice, or
promise, or bargain, but merely by status.

It is admitted that when Christianity had
been for some time at work in the world, this
ancient servile status began in some mysterious
manner to disappear. I suggest here that one
of the forms which the new spirit took was
the importance of the vow. Feudalism, for
instance, differed from slavery chiefly because
feudalism was a vow. The vassal put his
hands in those of his lord, and vowed to be
his man ; but there was an accent on the
noun substantive as well as on the possessive

88

THE STORY OF THE VOW

pronoun. By swearing to be his man, he
proved he was not his chattel. Nobody exacts
a promise from a pickaxe ; or expects a poker
to swear everlasting friendship with the tongs.
Nobody takes the word of a spade ; and
nobody ever took the word of a slave. It
marks at least a special stage of transition that
the form of freedom was essential to the fact
of service, or even of servitude. In this way
it is not a coincidence that the word homage
actually means manhood. And if there was
vow instead of status even in the static parts
of Feudalism, it is needless to say that there
was a wilder luxuriance of vows in the more
adventurous part of it. The whole of what we
call chivalry was one great vow. Vows of
chivalry varied infinitely from the most solid
to the most fantastic ; from a vow to give all
the spoils of conquest to the poor to a vow to
refrain from shaving until the first glimpse of
Jerusalem. As I have remarked, this rule of
loyalty, even in the unruly exceptions which
proved the rule, ran through all the romances

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THE STORY OF THE VOW

and songs of the troubadours ; and there were
always vows even when they were very far
from being marriage vows. The idea is as
much present in what they called the Gay
Science, of love, as in what they called the
Divine Science, of theology. The modern
reader will smile at the mention of these
things as sciences ; and will turn to the study
of sociology, ethnology and psycho-analysis ;
for if these are sciences (about which I would
not divulge a doubt) at least nobody would
insult them by calling them either gay or
divine.

I mean here to emphasise the presence, and
not even to settle the proportion, of this new
notion in the middle ages. But the critic will
be quite wrong if he thinks it enough to answer
that all these things affected only a cultured
class, not corresponding to the servile class of
antiquity. When we come to workmen and
small tradesmen, we find the same vague yet
vivid presence of the spirit that can only be
called the vow. In this sense there was a

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THE STORY OF THE VOW

chivalry of trades as well as a chivalry of orders
of knighthood ; just as there was a heraldry of
shop-signs as well as a heraldry of shields.
Only it happens that in the enlightenment and
liberation of the sixteenth century, the heraldry
of the rich was preserved, and the heraldry of
the poor destroyed. And there is a sinister
symbolism in the fact that almost the only
emblem still hung above a shop is that of the
three balls of Lombardy. Of all those demo-
cratic glories nothing can now glitter in the
sun ; except the sign of the golden usury that
has devoured them all. The point here, how-
ever, is that the trade or craft had not only
something like the crest, but something like
the vow of knighthood. There was in the
position of the guildsman the same basic
notion that belonged to knights and even to
monks. It was the notion of the free choice
of a fixed estate. We can realise the moral
atmosphere if we compare the system of the
Christian guilds, not only with the status of
the Greek and Roman slaves, but with such a

91

THE STORY OF THE VOW

scheme as that of the Indian castes. The
oriental caste has some of the qualities of the
occidental guild ; especially the valuable quality
of tradition and the accumulation of culture.
Men might be proud of their castes, as they
were proud of their guilds. But they haB
never chosen their castes, as they have chosen
their guilds. They had never, within historic
memory, even collectively created their castes,
as they collectively created their guilds. Like
the slave system, the caste system was older
than history. The heathens of jnodern Asia,
as much as the heathens of ancient Europe,
lived by the very spirit of status. Status in a
trade has been accepted like status in a tribe ;
and that in a tribe of beasts and birds rather
than men. The fisherman continued to be a
fisherman as the fish continued to be a fish ;
and the hunter would no more turn into a cook
than his dog would try its luck as a cat.
Certainly his dog would not be found prostrated
before the mysterious altar of Pasht, barking or
whining a wild, lonely, and individual vow that

92

THE STORY OF THE VOW

he at all costs would become a cat. Yet that
was the vital revolt and innovation of vows, as
compared with castes or slavery ; as when a
man vowed to be a monk, or the son of a
cobbler saluted the shrine of St. Joseph the
patron saint of carpenters. When he had
entered the guild of the carpenters he did
indeed find himself responsible for a very real
loyalty and discipline ; but the whole social
atmosphere surrounding his entrance was full
of the sense of a separate and personal decision.
There is one place where we can still find this
sentiment ; the sentiment of something at once
free and final. We can feel it, if the service
is properly understood, before and after the
marriage vows at any ordinary wedding in any
ordinary church.

Such, in very vague outline, has been the
historical nature of vows ; and the unique part
they played in that mediaeval civilisation out
of which modern civilisation rose — or fell. We
can now consider, a little less cloudily than it
is generally considered nowadays, whether

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THE STORY OF THE VOW

we really think vows are good things ; whether
they ought to be broken ; and (as would
naturally follow) whether they ought to be
made. But we can never judge it fairly till we
face, as I have tried to suggest, this main fact
of history : that the personal pledge, feudal or
civic or monastic, was the way in which the
world did escape from the system of slavery in
the past. For the modern break-down of mere
contract leaves it still doubtful if there be any
other way of escaping it in the future.

The idea, or at any rate the ideal, of the
thing called a vow is fairly obvious. It is to
combine the fixity that goes with finality with
the self-respect that only goes with freedom.
The man is a slave who is his own master,
and a king who is his own ancestor. For all
kinds of social purposes he has the calculable
orbit of the man in the caste or the servile
state ; but in the -story of his own soul he is
still pursuing, at great peril, his own adventure.
As seen by his neighbours, he is as safe as if
immured in a fortress ; but as seen by himself

94

THE STORY OF THE VOW

he may be for ever careering through the sky
or crashing towards the earth in a flying-ship.
What is socially humdrum is produced by what
is individually heroic ; and a city is made not
merely of citizens but knight-errants. It is
needless to point out the part played by the
monastery in civilising Europe in its most
barbaric interregnum ; and even those who still
denounce the monasteries will be found de-
nouncing them for these two extreme and
apparently opposite eccentricities. They are
blamed for the rigid character of their collective
routine ; and also for the fantastic character of
their individual fanaticism. For the purposes
of this part of the argument, it would not
matter if the marriage vow produced the most
austere discomforts of the monastic vow. The
point for the present is that it was sustained
by a sense of free will; and the feeling that
its evils were not accepted but chosen. The
same spirit ran through all the guilds and
popular arts /and spontaneous social systems
of the whole civilisation. It had all the

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THE STORY OF THE VOW

discipline of an army ; but it was an army of
volunteers.

The civilisation of vows was broken up
when Henry the Eighth broke his own vow of
marriage. Or rather, it was broken up by a
new cynicism in the ruling powers of Europe,
of which that was the almost accidental ex-
pression in England. The monasteries, that
had been built by vows, were destroyed. The
guilds, that had been regiments of volunteers,
were dispersed. The sacramental nature of
marriage was denied ; and many of the greatest
intellects of the new movement, like Milton,
already indulged in a very modern idealisation
of divorce. The progress of this sort of
emancipation advanced step by step with the
progress of that aristocratic ascendancy which
has made the history of modern England ; with
all its sympathy with personal liberty, and all
its utter lack of sympathy with popular life.
Marriage not only became less of a sacrament
but less of a sanctity. It threatened to become
not only a contract, but a contract that could

96

THE STORY OF THE VOW

not be kept. For this one question has
retained a strange symbolic supremacy amid
all the similar questions, which seems to per-
petuate the coincidence of the origin. It
began with divorce for a king ; and it is now
ending in divorces for a whole kingdom.

The modern era that followed can be called
the era of contract ; but it can still more truly
be called the era of leonine contract. The
nobles of the new time first robbed the people,
and then offered to bargain with them. It
would not be an exaggeration to say that they
first robbed the people, and then offered to
cheat them. For their rents were competitive
rents, their economics competitive economics,
their ethics competitive ethics ; they applied not
only legality but pettifogging. No more was
heard of the customary rents of the mediaeval
estates ; just as no more was heard of the
standard wages of the mediaeval guilds. The
object of the whole process was to isolate
the individual poor man in his dealings with
the individual rich man ; and then offer to buy

97 H

THE STORY OF THE VOW

and sell with him, though it must necessarily
be himself that was bought and sold. In the
matter of labour, that is, though a man was
supposed to be in the position of a seller, he
was more and more really in the possession
of a slave. Unless the tendency be reversed,
he will probably become admittedly a slave.
That is to say, the word slave will never be
used, for it is always easy to find an inoffensive
word ; but he will be admittedly a man legally
bound to certain social service, in return for
economic security. In other words, the modern
experiment of mere contract has broken down.
Trusts as well as Trades Unions express the
fact that it has broken down. Social reform,
Socialism, Guild Socialism, Syndicalism, even
organised philanthropy, are so many ways of
saying that it has broken down. The substitute
for it maybe the old one of status ; but it must
be something having some of the stability of
status. So far history has found only one way
of combining that sort of stability with any
sort of liberty. In this sense there is a meaning

98

THE STORY OF THE VOW

in the much misused phrase about the army
of industry. But the army must be stiffened
either by the discipline of conscripts or by the
vows of volunteers.

If we may extend the doubtful metaphor of
an army of industry to cover the yet weaker
phrase about captains of industry, there is no
doubt about what those captains at present
command. They work for a centralised dis-
cipline in every department. They erect a
vast apparatus of supervision and inspection ;
they support all the modern restrictions touch-
ing drink and hygiene. They may be called
the friends of temperance or even of happiness ;
but even their friends would not call them the
friends of freedom. There is only one form of
freedom which they tolerate ; and that is the
sort of sexual freedom which is covered by the
legal fiction of divorce. If we ask why this
liberty is alone left, when so many liberties are
lost, we shall find the answer in the summary
of this chapter. They are trying to break the
vow of the knight as they broke the vow of

99

THE STORY OF THE VOW

the monk. They recognise the vow as the vital
antithesis to servile status ; the alternative and
therefore the antagonist. Marriage makes a
snjall state within the state, which resists all
such regimentation. That bond breaks all other
bonds ; that law is found stronger than all later
and lesser laws. They desire the democracy
to be sexually fluid, because the making of
small nuclei is like the making of small
nations. Like small nations, they are a
nuisance to the mind of imperial scope. In
short, what they fear, in the most literal sense,
is home rule.

Men can always be blind to a thing so long
as it is big enough. It is so difficult to see
the world in which we live, that I know that
many will see all I have said here of slavery
as a nonsensical nightmare. But if my associa-
tion of divorce with slavery seems only a far-
fetched and theoretical paradox, I should have
no difficulty in replacing it by a concrete and
familiar picture. Let them merely remember
the time when they read " Uncle Tom's

ICO

THE STORY OF THE VOW

Cabin," and ask themselves whether the
oldest and simplest of the charges against
slavery has not always been the breaking up
of families.

lOl

THE TRAGEDIES OF
MARRIAGE

THE TRAGEDIES OF
MARRIAGE

There is one view very common among the
liberal-minded which is exceedingly fatiguing
to the clear-headed. It is symbolised in the
sort of man who says " These ruthless bigots
will refuse to bury me in consecrated ground,
because I have always refused to be baptised."
A clear-headed person can easily conceive his
point of view, in so far as he happens to think
that baptism does not matter. But the clear-
headed will be completely puzzled when they
ask themselves why, if he thinks that baptism
does not matter, he should think that burial
does matter. If it is in no way imprudent for a
man to keep himself from a consecrated font,
how can it be inhuman for other people to
keep him from a consecrated field ? It is surely

105

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

much nearer to mere superstition to attach im-
portance to what is done to a dead body than
to a live baby. I can understand a man think-
ing both superstitious, or both sacred ; but I
cannot see why he should grumble that other
people do not give him as sanctities what he
regards as superstitions. He is merely com-
plaining of being treated as what he declares
himself to be. It is as if a man were to say
" My persecutors still refuse to make me king,
out of mere malice because I am a strict re-
publican." Or it is as if he said "These
heartless brutes are so prejudiced against a
teetotaler, that they won't even give him a
glass of brandy."

The fashion of divorce would not be a
modern fashion if it were not full of this touch-
ing fallacy. A great deal of it might be summed
up as a most illogical and fanatical appetite
for getting married in churches. It is as if a
man should practice polygamy out of sheer
greed for wedding cake. Or it is as if he
provided his household with new shoes, entirely

1 06

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

by having them thrown after the wedding
carriage when he went off with a new wife.
There are other ways of procuring cake
or purchasing shoes ; and there are other
ways of setting up a human establishment.
What is unreasonable is the request which
the modern man really makes of the religious
institutions of his fathers. The modern man
wants to buy one shoe without the other ; to
obtain one half of a supernatural revelation
without the other. The modern man wants
to eat his wedding cake and have it too.

I am not basing this book on the religious
argument, and therefore I will not pause to
inquire why the old Catholic institutions of
Christianity seem to be especially made the
objects of these unreasonable complaints. As
a matter of fact nobody does propose that
some ferocious Anti-Semite like M. Drumont
should be buried as a Jew with all the rites
of the Synagogue. But the broad-minded
were furious because Tolstoi, who had de-
nounced Russian orthodoxy quite as ferociously,

107

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

was not buried as orthodox, with all the rites of
the Russian Church. Nobody does insist that
a man who wishes to have fifty wives when
Mahomet allowed him five, must have his fifty
with the full approval of Mahomet's religion.
But the broad-minded are extremely bitter
because a Christian who wishes to have several
wives when his own promise bound him to
one, is not allowed to violate his vow at the
same altar at which he made it. Nobody does
insist on Baptists totally immersing people who
totally deny the advantages of being totally
immersed. Nobody ever did expect Mormons
to receive the open mockers of the Book of
Mormon, nor Christian Scientists to let their
churches be used for exposing Mrs. Eddy as
an old fraud. It is only of the forms of
Christianity making the Catholic claim that
such inconsistent claims are made. And even
the inconsistency is, I fancy, a tribute to the
acceptance of the Catholic idea in a catholic
fashion. It may be that men have an obscure
sense that nobody need belong to the Mormon

io8

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

religion and every one does ultimately belong
to the Church ; and though he may have made
a few dozen Mormon marriages in a wandering
and entertaining life, he will really have no-
where to go to if he does not somehow find his
way back to the churchyard. But all this con-
cerns the general theological question and not
the matter involved here, which is merely
historical and social. The point here is that it
is at least superficially inconsistent to ask
institutions for a formal approval, which they
can only give by an inconsistency.

I have put first the question of what is
marriage. And we are now in a position to
ask more clearly what is divorce. It is not
merely the negation or neglect of marriage ;
for any one can always neglect marriage. It
is not the dissolution of the legal obligation of
marriage, or even the legal obligation of mono-
gamy ; for the simple reason that no such
obligation exists. Any man in modern London
may have a hundred wives if he does not call
them wives ; or rather, if he does not go through
109

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

certain more or less mystical ceremonies in
order to assert that they are wives. He might
create a certain social coolness round his house-
hold, a certain fading of his general popularity.
But that is not created by law, and could not
be prevented by law. As the late Lord Salis-
bury very sensibly observed about boycotting
in Ireland, " How can you make a law to
prevent people going out of the room when
somebody they don't like comes into it ? ''
We ;cannot be forcibly introduced to a poly-
gamist by a policeman. It would not be an
assertion of social liberty, but a denial of social
liberty, if we found ourselves practically obliged
to associate with all the profligates in society.
But divorce is not in this sense mere anarchy.
On the contrary divorce is in this sense respect-
ability ; and even a rigid excess of respectability.
Divorce in this sense might indeed be not un-
fairly called snobbery. The definition of
divorce, which concerns us here, is that it is
the attempt to give respectability, and not
liberty. It is the attempt to give a certain

no

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

social status, and not a legal status. It is
indeed supposed that this can be done by the
alteration of certain legal forms ; and this will
be more or less true according to the extent to
which law as such overawed public opinion, or
was valued as a true expression of public
opinion. If a man divorced in the large-minded
fashion of Henry the Eighth pleaded his legal-
title among the peasantry of Ireland, for in-
stance, I think he would find a difference still
existing between respectability and religion.
But the peculiar point here is that many- are
claiming the sanction of religion as well as of
respectability. They would attach to their
very natural and sometimes very pardonable
experiments a certain atmosphere, and even
glamour, which has undoubtedly belonged to
the status of marriage in historic Christendom.
But before they make this attempt, it would be
well to ask why such a dignity ever appeared
or in what it consisted. And I fancy we shall
find ourselves confronted with the very simple
truth, that the dignity arose wholly and entirely

I II

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

out of the fidelity ; and that the glamour merely
came from the vow. People were regarded as
having a certain dignity because they were
dedicated in a certain way ; as bound to certain
duties and, if it be preferred, to certain dis-
comforts. It may be irrational to endure these
discomforts ; it may even be irrational to respect
them. But it is certainly much more irrational
to respect them, and then artificially transfer
the same respect to the absence of them. It
is as if we were to expect uniforms to be saluted
when armies were disbanded ; and ask people
to cheer a soldier's coat when it did not contain
a soldier. If you think you can abolish war,
abolish it ; but do not suppose that when there
are no wars to be waged, there will still be
warriors to be worshipped. If it was a good
thing that the monasteries were dissolved, let
us say so and dismiss them. But the noble^
who dissolved the monasteries did not shave
their heads, and ask to be regarded as saints
solely on account of that ceremony. The
nobles did not dress up as abbots and ask to

I 12

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

be credited with a potential talent for working
miracles, because of the austerity of their vows
of poverty and chastity. They got inside the
houses, but not the hoods, and still less the
haloes. They at least knew that it is not
the habit that makes the monk. They were
not so superstitious as those moderns, who think
it is the veil that makes the bride.

What is respected, in short, is fidelity to
the ancient flag of the family, and a readiness
to fight for what I have noted as its unique
type of freedom. I say readiness to fight •
for fortunately the fight itself is the exception
rather than the rule. The soldier is not
respected because he is doomed to death, but
because he is ready for death ; and even ready
for defeat. The married man or woman is not
doomed to evil, sickness or poverty ; but is
respected for taking a certain step for better
for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness
or in health. But there is one result of this
line of argument which should correct a danger
in some arguments on the same side.

113 I

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

It is very essential that a stricture on
divorce, which is in fact simply a defence
of marriage, should be independent of senti-
mentalism, especially in the form called
optimism. A man justifying a fight for national
independence or civic freedom is neither senti-
mental nor optimistic. He explains the sacrifice,
but he does not explain it away. He does not
say that bayonet wounds are pin-pricks, or
mere scratches of the thorns on the rose of
pleasure. He does not say that the whole
display of firearms is a festive display of fire-
works. On the contrary, when he praises it
most, he praises it as pain rather than pleasure.
He increases the praise with the pain ; it is
his whole boast that militarism, and even
modern science, can produce no instrument of
torture to tame the soul of man. It is idle,
in speaking of war, to pit the realistic against
the romantic, in the sense of the heroic ; for all
possible realism can only increase the heroism ;
and therefore, in the highest sense, increase the
romance. Now I do not compare marriage

114

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

with war, but I do compare marriage with law
or liberty or patriotism or popular government,
or any of the human ideals which have often
to be defended by war. Even the wildest of
those ideals, which seem to escape from all
the discipline of peace, do not escape from
the discipline of war. The Bolshevists may
have aimed at pure peace and liberty; but
they have been compelled, for their own
purpose, first to raise armies and then to rule
armies. In a word, however beautiful you
may think your own visions of beatitude, men
must suffer to be beautiful, and even suffer a
considerable interval of being ugly. And I
have no notion of denying that mankind suffers
much from the maintenance of the standard
of marriage ; as it suffers much from the
necessity of criminal law or the recurrence of
crusades and revolutions. The only question
here is whether marriage is indeed, as I
maintain, an ideal and an institution making
for popular freedom ; I do not need to be told
that anything making for popular freedom has

115

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

to be paid for in vigilance and pain, and a
whole army of martyrs.

Hence I am far indeed from denying the
hard cases which exist here, as in all matters
involving the idea of honour. For indeed I
could not deny them without denying the
whole parallel of militant morality on which
my argument rests. But this being first under-
stood, it will be well to discuss in a little more
detail what are described as the tragedies of
marriage. And the first thing to note about
the most tragic of them is that they are not
tragedies of marriage at all. They are tragedies
of sex ; and might easilyoccur in a highly modern
romance in which marriage was not mentioned
at all. It is generally summarised by saying
that the tragic element is the absence of love.
But it is often forgotten that another tragic
element is often the presence of love. The
doctors of divorce, with an air of the frank
and friendly realism of men of the world,
are always recommending and rejoicing in a
sensible separation by mutual conseht. But if

ii6

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

we are really to dismiss our dreams of dignity
and honour, if we are really to fall back on
the frank realism of our experience as men of
the world, then the very first thing that our
experience will tell us is that it very seldom
is a separation by mutual consent ; that is, that
the consent very seldom is sincerely and
spontaneously mutual. By far the commonest
problem in such cases is that in which one
party wishes to end the partnership and the
other does not. And of that emotional situa-
tion you can make nothing but a tragedy,
whichever way you turn it. With or without
marriage, with or without divorce, with or
without any arrangements that anybody can
suggest or imagine, it remains a tragedy. The
only difference is that by the doctrine of
marriage it remains both a noble and a fruitful
tragedy ; like that of a man who falls fighting
for his country, or dies testifying to the truth.
But the truth is that the innovators have as
much sham optimism about divorce as any
romanticist can have had about marriage,

117

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

They regard their story, when it ends in the
divorce court, through as rosy a mist of
sentimentalism as anybody ever regarded a story
ending with wedding bells. Such a reformer
is quite sure that when once the prince and
princess are divorced by the fairy godmother,
they will live happily ever after. I enjoy
romance, but I like it to be rooted in reality ;
and any one with a touch of reality knows that
nine couples out of ten, when they are divorced,
are left in an exceedingly different state. It
will be safe to say in most cases that one
partner will fail to find happiness in an infatua-
tion, and the other will from the first accept
a tragedy. In the realm of reality and not
of romance, it is commonly a case of breaking
hearts as well as breaking promises ; and even
dishonour is not always a remedy for remorse.
The next limitation to be laid down in the
matter affects certain practical forms of dis-
comfort, on a level rather lower than love or
hatred. The cases most commonly quoted
concern what is called " drink " and what is

ii8

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

called "cruelty." They are always talked
about as matters of fact; though in practice
they are very decidedly matters of opinion.
It is not a flippancy, but a fact, that the
misfortune of the woman who has married a
drunkard may have to be balanced against the
misfortune of the man who has married a
teetotaler. For the very definition of drunken-
ness may depend on the dogma of teetotalism.
Drunkenness, it has been very truly observed,*
" may mean anything from delirium tremens
to having a stronger head than the official
appointed to conduct the examination." Mr.
Bernard Shaw once professed, apparently
seriously, that any man drinking wine or beer
at all was incapacitated from managing a
motor-car ; and still more, therefore, one would
suppose, from managing a wife. The scales
are weighted here, of course, with all those
false weights of snobbishness which are the
curse of justice in this country. The working
class is forced to conduct almost in public a

* The late Cecil Chesterton, in the New Witness.
119

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

normal and varying festive habit, which the
upper class can afford to conduct in private;
and a certain section of the middle class, that
which happens to concern itself most with
local politics and social reforms, really has or
afffects a standard quite abnormal and even
alien. They might go any lengths of injustice
in dealing with the working man or working
woman accused of too hearty a taste in beer.
To mention but one matter out of a thousand,
the middle class reformers are obviously quite
ignorant of the hours at which working people
begin to work. Because they themselves, at
eleven o'clock in the morning, have only
recently finished breakfast and the full moral
digestion of the Daily Mail, they think a char-
woman drinking beer at that hour is one of
those rising early in the morning to follow
after strong drink. Most of them really do
not know that she has already done more than
half a heavy day's work, and is partaking of a
very reasonable luncheon. The whole problem
of proletarian drink is entangled in a network of

1 20

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

these misunderstandings ; and there is no doubt
whatever that, when judged by these generalisa-
tions, the poor will be taken in a net of
injustices. And this truth is as certain in the
case of what is called cruelty as of what is
called drink. Nine times out of ten the
judgment on a navvy for hitting a woman
is about as just as a judgment on him for not
taking off his hat to a lady. It is a class test ;
it may be a class superiority ; but it is not an
act of equal justice between the classes. It
leaves out a thousand things ; the provocation,
the atmosphere, the harassing restrictions of
space, the nagging which Dickens described as
the terrors of " temper in a cart," the absence
of certain taboos of social training, the tradition
of greater roughness even in the gestures of
affection. To make all marriage or divorce,
in the case of such a man, turn upon a blow is
like blasting the whole life of a gentleman
because he has slammed the door. Often a
poor man cannot slam the door ; partly because
the model villa might fall down ; but more

121

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

because he has nowhere to go to ; the
smoking-room, the billiard-room and the pea-
cock music-room not being yet attached to his
premises.

I say this in passing, to point out that
while I do not dream of suggesting that there
are only happy marriages, there will quite cer-
tainly, as things work nowadays, be a very large
number of unhappy and unjust divorces. They
will be cases in which the innocent partner will
receive the real punishment of the guilty
partner, through being in fact and feeling the
faithful partner. For instance, it is insisted
that a married person must at least find release
from the society of a lunatic ; but it is also true
that the scientific reformers, with their fuss
about "the feeble-minded," are continually
giving larger and looser definitions of lunacy.
The process might begin by releasing some-
body from a homicidal maniac, and end by
dealing in the same way with a rather dull
conversationalist. But in fact nobody does
deny that a person should be allowed some

122

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

sort of release from a homicidal maniac.
The most extreme school of orthodoxy only
maintains that anybody who has had that
experience should be content with that release.
In other words, it says he should be content
with that experience of matrimony, and not
seek another. It was put very wittily, I think,
by a Roman Catholic friend of mine, who said
he approved of release so long as it was not
spelt with a hyphen.

To put it roughly, we are prepared in some
cases to listen to the man who complains of
having a wife. But we are not prepared to
listen, at such length, to the same man when he
comes back and complains that he has not got
a wife. Now in practice at this moment the
great mass of the complaints are precisely of
this kind. The reformers insist particularly
on the pathos of a man's position when he has
obtained a separation without a divorce. Their
most tragic figure is that of the man who is
already free of all those ills he had, and is
only asking to be allowed to fly to others that

123

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

he knows not of. I should be the last to deny
that, in certain emotional circumstances, his
tragedy may be very tragic indeed. But his
tragedy is of the emotional kind which can
never be entirely eliminated ; and which he
has himself, in all probability, inflicted on the
partner he has left. We may call it the price
of maintaining an ideal or the price of making
a mistake ; but anyhow it is the point of our
whole distinction in the matter ; it is here that
we draw the line, and I have nowhere denied
that it is a line of battle. The battle joins on
the debatable ground, not of the man's doubtful
past but of his still more doubtful future. In
a word, the divorce controversy is not really a
controversy about divorce. It is a controversy
about re-marriage ; or rather about whether it
is marriage at all.

And with that we can only return to the
point of honour which I have compared here
to a point of patriotism ; since it is both the
smallest and the greatest kind of patriotism.
Men have died in torments during the last five

124

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

years for points of patriotism far more dubious
and fugitive. Men like the Poles or the
Serbians, through long periods of their history,
may be said rather to have lived in torments.
I will never admit that the vital need of the
freedom of the family, as I have tried to sketch
it here, is not a cause as valuable as the
freedom of any frontier. But I do willingly
admit that the cause would be a dark and
terrible one, if it really asked these men to
suffer torments. As I have stated it, on its
most extreme terms, it only asks them to suffer
abnegations. And those negative sufferings I
do think they may honourably be called upon
to bear, for the glory of their own oath and the
great things by which the nations live. In
relation to their own nation most normal men
will feel that this distinction between release
and " re-lease " is neither fanciful nor harsh, but
very rational and human. A patriot may be an
exile in another country ; but he will not be a
patriot of another country. He will be as cheer-
ful as he can in an abnormal position ; he may

125

THE TRAGEDIES OF MARRIAGE

or may not sing his country's songs in a strange
land ; but he will not sing the strange songs as
his own. And such may fairly be also the
attitude of the citizen who has gone into exile
from the oldest of earthly cities.

126

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

The case for divorce combines all the advan-
tages of having it both ways ; and of drawing
the same deduction from right or left, and from
black or white. Whichever way the pro-
gramme works in practice, it can still be
justified in theory. If there are few examples
of divorce, it shows how little divorce need
be dreaded ; if there are many, it shows how
much it is required. The rarity of divorce
is an argument in favour of divorce ; and the
multiplicity of divorce is an argument against
marriage. Now, in truth, if we were confined
to considering this alternative in a speculative
manner, if there were no concrete facts but
only abstract probabilities, we should have no
difficulty in arguing our case. The abstract

129 K

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

liberty allowed by the reformers is as near as
possible to anarchy, and gives no logical or
legal guarantee worth discussing. The advan-
tages of their reform do not accrue to the
innocent party, but to the guilty party ;
especially if he be sufficiently guilty. A man
has only to commit the crime of desertion to
obtain the reward of divorce. And if they are
entitled to take as typical the most horrible
hypothetical cases of the abuse of the marriage
laws, surely we are entitled to take equally
extreme possibilities in the abuse of their own
divorce laws. If they, when looking about for
a husband, so often hit upon a homicidal
maniac, surely we may politely introduce them
to the far more hijman figure of the gentleman
who marries as many women as he likes and
gets rid of them as often as he pleases. But
in fact there is no necessity for us to argue
thus in the abstract ; for the amiable gentle-
man in question undoubtedly exists in the
concrete. Of course, he is no new figure ; he
is a very recurrent type of rascal ; his name

130

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

has been Lothario or Don Juan; and he has often
been represented as a rather romantic rascal.
The point of divorce reform, it cannot be too
often repeated, is that the rascal should not
only be regarded as romantic, but regarded as
respectable. He is not to sow his wild oats
and settle down ; he is merely to settle down
to sowing his wild oats. They are to be
regarded as tame and inoffensive oats ; almost,
if one may say so, as Quaker oats. But there
is no need, as I say, to speculate about
whether the looser view of divorce might
prevail ; for it is already prevailing. The
newspapers are full of an astonishing hilarity
about the rapidity with which hundreds or
thousands of human families are being broken
up by the la)vyers ; and about the undisguised
haste, of the "hustling judges" who carry on
the work. It is a form of hilarity which would
seem to recall the gaiety of a grave-digger in
a city swept by a pestilence. But a few details
occasionally flash by in the happy dance ; from
time to time the court is moved by a momentary

131

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

curiosity about the causes of the general
violation of oaths and promises ; as if there
might, here and there, be a hint of some sort of
reason for ruining the fundamental institution
of society. And nobody who notes those details,
or considers those faint hints of reason, can
doubt for a moment that masses of these men
and women are now simply using divorce in the
spirit of free-love. They are very seldom the
sort of people who have once fallen tragically
into the wrong place, and have now found their
way triumphantly to the right place. They are
almost always people who are obviously
wandering from one place to another, and will
probably leave their last shelter exactly as they
have left their first. But it seems to amuse
them to make again, if possible in a church,
a promise they have already broken in
practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in
principle.

In face of this headlong fashion, it is really
reasonable to ask the divorce reformers what is
their attitude towards the old monogamous

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ethic of our civilisation ; and whether they wish
to retain it in general, or to retain it at all.
Unfortunately even the sincerest and most
lucid of them use language which leaves the
matter a little doubtful. Mr, E. S. P. Haynes
is one of the most brilliant and most fair-minded
controversialists on that side ; and he has said,
for instance, that he agrees with me in support-
ing the ideal of indissoluble or, at least, of
undissolved marriage. Mr. Haynes is one of
the few friends of divorce who are also real
friends of democracy ; and I am sure that in
practice this stands for a real sympathy with
the home, especially the poor home. Unfortu-
nately, on the theoretic side, the word " ideal "
is far from being an exact term, and is open to
two almost opposite interpretations. For many
would say that marriage is an ideal as some
would say that monasticism is an ideal, in the
sense of a counsel of perfection. Now certainly
we might preserve a conjugal ideal in this way.
A man might be reverently pointed out in the
street as a sort of saint, merely because he was

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THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

married, A man might wear a medal for
monogamy ; or have letters after his name
similar to V.C. or D.D. ; let us say L.W. for
" Lives With his Wife," or N.D.Y. for " Not
Divorced Yet." We might, on entering some
strange city, be struck by a stately column
erected to the memory of a wife who never ran
away with a soldier, or the shrine and image of
a historical character, who had resisted the
example of the man in the " N«w Witness "
ballade in bolting with the children's nurse.
Such high artistic hagiology would be quite
consistent with Mr. Haynes' divorce reform ;
with re-marriage after three years, or three
hours. It would also be quite consistent with
Mr, Haynes' phrase about preserving an
ideal of marriage. What it would not be
consistent with is the perfectly plain, solid,
secular and social usefulness which I have here
attributed to marriage. It does not create or
preserve a natural institution, normal to the
whole community, to balance the more artificial
and even more arbitrary institution of the state ;

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which is less natural even if it is equally-
necessary. It does not defend a voluntary
association, but leaves the only claim on life,
deatli and loyalty with a more coercive institu-
tion. It does not stand, in the sense I have
tried to explain, for the principle of liberty.
In short, it does not do any of the things which
Mr. Haynes himself would especially desire to
see done. For humanity to be thus spon-
taneously organised from below, it is necessary
that the organisation should be almost as
universal as the official organisation from above.
The tyrant must find not one family but many
families defying his power ; he must find
mankind not a dust of atoms, but fixed in solid
blocks of fidelity. And those human groups
must support not only themselves but each
other. In this sense what some call individu-
alism is as corporate as communism. It is a
thing of volunteers ; but volunteers must be
soldiers. It is a defence of private persons ;
but we might say that the private persons must
be private soldiers. The family must be

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THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

recognised as well as real; above all, the
family must be recognised by the families. To
expect individuals to suffer successfully for a
home apart from the home, that is for some-
thing which is an incident but not an institu-
tion, is really a confusion between two ideas ;
it is a verbal sophistry almost in the nature of
a pun. Similarly, for instance, we cannot
prove the moral force of a peasantry by
pointing to one peasant; we might' almost as
well reveal the military force of infantry by
pointing to one infant.

I take it however that the advocates of
divorce do not mean that marriage is to remain
ideal only in the sense of being almost im-
possible. They do not mean that a faithful
husband is only to be admired as a fanatic.
The reasonable men among them do really
mean that a divorced person shall be tolerated
as something unusually unfortunate, not merely
that a married person shall be admired as
something unusually blessed and inspired. But
whatever they desire, it is as well that they

136

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

should realise exactly what they do; and in
this case I should like to hear their criticisms
in the matter of what they see. They must
surely see that in England at present, as in
many parts of America in the past, the new
liberty is being taken in the spirit of licence,
as if the exception were tp be the rule, or,
rather, perhaps the absence of rule. This will
especially be made manifest if we consider
that the effect of the process is accumulative
like a snowball, and returns on itself like a
snowball. The obvious effect of frivolous
divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people
can be separated for no reason they will feel
it all the easier to be united for no reason. A
man might quite clearly foresee that a sensual
infatuation would be fleeting, and console him-
self with the knowledge that the connection
could be equally fleeting. There seems no
particular reason why he should not elaborately
calculate that he could stand a particular lady's
temper for ten months; or reckon that he
would have enjoyed and exhausted her

^2,7

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

repertoire of drawing-room songs in two years.
The old joke about choosing the wife to fit
the furniture or the fashions might quite
logically return, not as an old joke but as a
new solemnity ; indeed, it will be found that
a new religion is generally the return of an old
joke. A man might quite consistently see a
woman as suited to the period of the hobble
skirt, and as less suited to the threatened
recurrence of the crinoline. These fancies are
fantastic enough, but they are not a shade
more fantastic than the facts of many a divorce
controversy as urged in the divorce courts.
And this is to leave out altogether the most
fantastic fact of all : the winking at widespread
and conspicuous collusion. Collusion has be-
come not so much an illegal evasion as a legal
fiction, and even a legal institution, as it is
admirably satirised in Mr. Somerset Maugham's
brilliant play of " Home and Beauty." The
fact was very frankly brought before the public
by a man who was eminently calculated to
disarm satire by sincerity. Colonel Wedgewood

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THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

is a man who can never be too much
honoured, by all who have any hope of popular
liberties still finding champions in the midst
of parliamentary corruption. He is one of the
very few men alive who have shown both
military and political courage ; the courage of
the camp and the courage of the forum. And
doubtless he showed a third type of social
courage, in avowing the absurd expedient
which so many others are content merely to
accept and employ. It is admittedly a frantic
and farcical thing that a good man should find
or think it necessary to pretend to commit a sin.
Some of the divorce moralists seem to deduce
from this that he ought really to commit the sin.
They may possibly be aware, however, that
there are some who do not agree with them.

For this latter fact is the next step in the
speculative progress of the new morality.
The divorce advocates must be well aware
that modern civilisation still contains strong
elements, not the least intelligent and certainly
not the least vigorous, which will not accept

139

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

the new respectability as a substitute for the
old religious vow. The Roman Catholic
Church, the Anglo-Catholic school, the con-
servative peasantries, and a large section of the
popular life everywhere, will regard the riot of
divorce and re-marriage as they would any other
riot of irresponsibility. The consequence
would appear to be that two different standards
will appear in ordinary morality, and even in
ordinary society. Instead of the old social
distinction between those who are married and
those who are unmarried, there will be a
distinction between those who are married and
those who are really married. Society might
even become divided into two societies ; which
is perilously approximate to Disraeli's famous
exaggeration about England divided into two
nations. But whether England be actually so
divided or not, this note of the two nations is
the real note of warning in the matter. It is in
this connection, perhaps, that we have to
consider most gravely and doubtfully the future
of our own country.

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THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

Anarchy cannot last, but anarchic com-
munities cannot last either. Mere lawlessness
cannot live, but it can destroy life. The
nations of the earth always return to sanity and
solidarity ; but the nations which return to it
first are the nations which survive. We in
England cannot afFord to allow our social
institutions to go to pieces, as if this ancient
and noble country were an ephemeral colony.
We cannot afford it comparatively, even if we
could afford it positively. We are surrounded
by vigorous nations mainly rooted in the
peasant or permanent ideals ; notably in the
case of France and Ireland, I know that the
detested and detestably undemocratic parlia-
mentary clique, which corrupts France as it
does England, was persuaded or bribed by a
Jew named Naquet to pass a crude and recent
divorce law, which was full of the hatred of
Christianity. But only a very superficial critic
of France can be unaware that French parlia-
mentarism is superficial. The French nation
as a whole, the most rigidly respectable nation

141

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

in the world, will certainly go on living by
the old standards of domesticity. When
Frenchmen are not Christians they are
heathens ; the heathens who worshipped the
household gods. It might seem strange to
say, for instance, that an atheist like M.
Clemenceau has for his chief ideal a thing
called piety. But to understand this it is only
necessary to know a little Latin — and a little
French.

A short time ago, as I am well aware, it
would have sounded very strange to represent
the old religious and peasant communities either
as a model or a menace. It was counted a
queer thing to say, in the days when my friends
and I first said it ; in the days of my youth
when the republic of France and the religion
of Ireland were regarded as alike ridiculous and
decadent. But many things have happened
since then ; and it will not now be so easy to
persuade even newspaper-readers that Foch is
a 'fool, either because he is a Frenchman or
because he is a Catholic. The older tradition,

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THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

even in the most unfashionable forms, has
found champions in the most unexpected
quarters. Only the other day Dr. Saleeby, a
distinguished scientific critic who had made
himself the special advocate of all the instruc-
tion and organisation that is called social science,
startled his friends and foes alike by saying
that the peasant families in the West of Ireland
were far more satisfactory and successful than
those brooded over by all the benevolent
sociology of Bradford. He gave his testimony
from an entirely rationalistic and even material-
istic point of view ; indeed, he carried rationalism
so far as to give the preference to Roscommon
because the women are still mammals. To a
mind of the more traditional type it might seem
sufficient to say they are still mothers. To
a memory that lingers over the legends and
lyrical movements of mankind, it might seem
no great improvement to imagine a song that
ran " My mammal bids me bind my hair," or
" I'm to be Queen of the May, mammal, I'm
to be Queen of the May." But indeed the

143

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

truth to which he testified is all the more
arresting, because for him it was materialistic
and not mystical. The brute biological advan-
tage, as well as other advantages, was with
those for whom that truth was a truth ; and it
was all the more instinctive and automatic
where that truth was a tradition. The sort of
place where mothers are still something more
than mammals is the only sort of place where
they still are mammals. There the people are
still healthy animals ; healthy enough to hit
you if you call them animals. I also have, on
this merely controversial occasion, used through-
out the rationalistic and not the religious appeal.
But it is not unreasonable to note that the
materialistic advantages are really found among
those who most repudia,te materialism. This
one stray testimony is but a type of a thousand
things of the same kind, which will convince
any one with the sense of social atmospheres
that the day of the peasantries is not passing,
but rather arriving. It is the more complex
types of society that are now entangled in their

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THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

own complexities. Those who tell us, with a
monotonous metaphor, that we cannot put the
clock back, seem to be curiously unconscious of
the fact that their own clock has stopped. And
there is nothing so hopeless as clockwork when
it stops. A machine cannot mend itself; it
requires a man to mend it ; and the future lies
with those who can make living laws for men
and not merely dead laws for machinery. Those
living laws are not to be found in the scatter-
brained scepticism which is busy in the great
cities, dissolving what it cannot analyse. The
primary laws of man are to be found in the
permanent life of man; in those things that
have been common to it in every time and land,
though in the highest civilisation they have
reached an enrichment like that of the divine
romance of Cana in Galilee. We know that
many critics of such a story say that its ele-
ments are not permanent ; but indeed it is the
critics who are not permanent. A hundred
mad dogs of heresy have worried man from
the beginning ; but it was always the dog that

145 L

THE VISTA OF DIVORCE

died. We know there is a school of prigs who
disapprove of the wine ; and there may now
be a school of prigs who disapprove of the
wedding. For in such a case as the story of
Cana, it may be remarked that the pedants are
prejudiced against the earthly elements as much
as, or more than, the heavenly elements. It
is not the supernatural that disgusts them, so
much as the natural. And those of us who
have seen all the normal rules and relations of
humanity uprooted by random speculators, as
if they were abnormal abuses and almost
accidents, will understand why men have
sought for something divine if they wished to
preserve anything human. They will know
why common sense, cast out from some academy
of fads and fashions conducted on the lines of
a luxurious madhouse, has age after age sought
refuge in the high sanity of a sacrament.

146

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

This is a pamphlet and not a book ; and the
writer of a pamphlet not only deals with passing
things, but generally with things which he
hopes will pass. In that sense it is the object
of a pamphlet to be out of date as soon as
possible. It can only survive when it does
not succeed. The successful pamphlets are
necessarily dull ; and though I have no great
hopes of this being successful, I dare say it is
dull enough for all that. It is designed merely
to note certain fugitive proposals of the moment,
and compare them with certain recurrent
necessities of the race ; but especially the
necessity for some spontaneous social formation
freer than that of the state. If it were more
in the nature of a work of literature, with

H9t

CONCLUSION

anything like an ambition of endurance, I might
go deeper into the matter, and give some
suggestions about the philosophy or religion of
marriage, and the philosophy or religion of all
these rather random departures from it. Some
day perhaps I may try to write something
about the spiritual or psychological quarrel
between faith and fads. Here I will only say,
in conclusion, that I believe the universal
fallacy here is a fallacy of being universal.
There is a sense in which it is really a human
if heroic possibility to love everybody ; and the
young student will not find it a bad preliminary
exercise to love somebody. But the fallacy I
mean is that of a man who is not even content
to love everybody, but really wishes to be every-
body. He wishes to walk down a hundred
roads at once ; to sleep in a hundred houses at
once ; to live a hundred lives at once. To do
something like this in the imagination is one of
the occasional visions of art and poetry ; to
attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy
but inaction. Even in the arts it can only be

150

CONCLUSION

the first hint and not the final fiilfilment; a
man cannot work at once in bronze and marble,
or play the organ and the violin at the same
time. The universal vision of being such a
Briareus is a nightmare of nonsense even in the
merely imaginative world ; and ends in mere
nihilism in the social world. If a man had a
hundred houses, there would still be more
houses than he had days in which to dream of
them ; if a man had a hundred wives, there
would still be more women than he could ever
know. He would be an insane sultan jealous
of the whole human race, and even of the dead
and the unborn. I believe that behind the art
and philosophy of our time there is a consider-
able element of this bottomless ambition and
this unnatural hunger ; and since in these last
words I am touching only lightly on things
that would need much larger treatment, I will
admit that the rending of the ancient roof of
man is probably only a part of such an endless
and empty expansion. I asked in the last
chapter what those most wildly engaged in the

151

CONCLUSION

mere dance of divorce, as fantastic as the dance
of death, really expected for themselves or for
their children. And in the deepest sense I
think this is the answer ; that they expect the
impossible, that is the universal. They are
not crying for the moon, which is a definite
and therefore a defensible desire. They are
crying for the world ; and when they had it,
they would want another one. In the last
resort they would like to try every situation,
not in fancy but in fact ; but they cannot refuse
any and therefore cannot resolve on any. In
so far as this is the modern mood, it is a thing
so deadly as to be already dead. What is
vitally needed everywhere, in art as much as in
ethics, in poetry as much as in politics, is
choice ; a creative power in the will as well as
in the mind. Without that self-limitation of
somebody, nothing living will ever se-e the
light.

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